cultivation of moral science, afford a more agreeable picture of domestic comfort and philosophical conviviality, than might be expected in the family of a rigid stoic:
> Tecum etenim longos memini consumere soles,
> Et tecum primas epulis decerpere noctes.
> Unum opus, et requiem pariter disponimus ambo:
> Atque verecunda laxamus feria mensa.—*Sat. v.*
Can I forget how many a summer’s day,
Spent in your converse, stole, unmarked, away?
Or how, while listening with increased delight,
I snatched from feasts the earlier hours of night?—*Gifford.*The satires of Persius are written in a free, expostulatory, and argumentative manner; possessing the same justness of sentiment as those of Horace, but exerted in the way of derision, and not with the admirable raillery of that facetious author.
They are regarded by many as obscure; but this imputation arises more from unacquaintance with the characters and manners to which the author alludes, than from any peculiarity either in his language or composition.
His versification is harmonious; and we have only to remark, in addition to similar examples in other Latin writers, that, though Persius is acknowledged to have been both virtuous and modest, there are in the fourth satire a few passages which cannot decently admit of being translated.
Such was the freedom of the Romans, in the use of some expressions, which just refinement has now exploded.—
Another poet, in this period, was FABRICIUS VEIENTO, who wrote a severe satire against the priests of his time; as also one (399) against the