Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/176

162 the laugh against an ungenerous rival, and this in the spirit of a true gentleman, he finds a sly means of paying a delicate compliment to the taste of the public, upon whose appreciation of music he had to depend for support. It is plain that he gauged that public accurately. By degrees it becomes evident that he is getting on in his chosen profession not indeed to the extent of being able, as he puts it in a terse couplet, "to indulge his spirit to the full in its taste for the graceful and beautiful," but, at all events, of having wherewithal to discourse critically on the question of indulgence and economy, from which we infer that he had made something to save or to lose. After weighing the pros and cons in a more than usually didactic passage, he confides to his hearers and readers the reason why he inclines to a moderate rather than a reckless expenditure:—