Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/149

 hinge, and the excluded Fathers gazed on the dish that had gained an entrance. Admitted to the Presence, "Receive," quoth he of Picenum, "a fish too big for a private kitchen. Be this kept as a festive day; hasten to fill out thy belly with good things, and devour a turbot that has been preserved to grace thy reign. The fish himself wanted to be caught." Could flattery be more gross? Yet the Monarch's comb began to rise: there is nothing that divine Majesty will not believe concerning itself when lauded to the skies! But no platter could be found big enough for the fish; so a council of magnates is summoned; men hated by the Emperor, and on whose faces sat the pallor of that great and perilous friendship. First to answer the Ligurian's call "Haste, haste! he is seated!" was Pegasus, hastily catching up his cloak—he that hadnewly been appointed as bailiff over the astonished city. For what else but bailiffs were the Prefects of those days? Of whom Pegasus was the best, and the most righteous expounder of the law, though he thought that even in those dread days there should be no sword in the hand of Justice. Next to come in was the aged, genial Crispus. whose gentle soul well matched his style of eloquence. No better adviser than he for the ruler of lands and seas and nations had he been free, under that scourge and plague, to denounce cruelties and proffer honest counsels. But what can be more dangerous than the ear of a tyrant on whose caprice hangs the life of a friend who has come to talk of the rain or the heat or the showery spring weather? So Crispus never struck out against the torrent, nor was he one 63