. Hence, indolence and prurient literature are stigmatised. He
ridicules the extremes of extravagance, and of that parsimony by which
it is usually accompanied. "Am I on a festive day to have a nettle
dressed for me, and a smoked pig's cheek with a hole in its ear, in
order that that grandson of yours may be surfeited with goose liver, and
indulge in patrician amours. Am I to be a living anatomy that his pope's
stomach may shake with fat."[23] Alluding to the absurdity of the
prayers generally offered up, he uses language worthy of a Christian.
"You ask for vigour, but rich dishes and fat sausages prevent the gods
from granting your behest. You ask what your fleshly mind suggests. What
avails gold in sacrifice? Offer justice to God and man--generous honour,
and a soul free from pollution."

In Persius we miss the light geniality of Horace and the pure language
of the Augustan age, but we mark the complexity and finesse of a later
date, a form of thought bespeaking a comprehensive grasp, and suitable
to subtle minds. But as regards his humour it depends much on
exaggeration, and is proportionably weak, and beyond this we have little
but the coining of some words,[24] the using others in unaccustomed
senses, and a large seasoning of severity. He evidently aimed rather at
being corrective than amusing, and his covert attacks upon Nero were, no
doubt, well understood. Humour of a poor kind was evidently fashionable
at the day--the Emperor himself wrote Satires and was so fond of comic
performances that he first encouraged and rewarded a celebrated
pantomimic actor named Paris, and then put him to death for being his
rival in the mimetic art. Even Seneca could not resist the example of
his contemporaries, and we find the sedate philosopher attacking his
enemy with severe ridicule. Claudius had him sent into exile for eight
years to the picturesque but lonely Island of Corsica; and Seneca who
liked something more social and luxurious, held him up in a satire
bordering upon lampoon. The fanciful production was called the
Apolokokyntosis of Claudius; that is his apotheosis, except that,
instead of the Emperor being deified, he is supposed to be
"gourdified," changed not into a god, but into a pumpkin. Seneca, after
deriding Claudius' bodily defects, accuses him of committing many
atrocities, and finally sends him down from heaven to the nether world,
where a new punishment is invented for him--he is to be always trying to
throw