Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/227

 eloquent, just as boys admire the bird of Juno. Meantime the years flow by that could have endured the sea, the helmet, or the spade; the soul becomes wearied, and an eloquent but penniless old age curses itself and its own Terpsichore!

And now learn the devices by which the patron for whose favour you desert the temples of the Muses and Apollo seeks to avoid spending anything on you. He writes verses of his own; yielding the palm to none but Homer—and that only because of his thousand years. If the sweets of fame fire you to give a recitation, he puts at your disposal a tumbledown house in some distant quarter, the door of which is closely barred like the gate of a beleaguered city. He knows how to supply you with freedmen to sit at the end of the rows, and how to distribute about the room the stalwart voices of his retainers; but none of your great men will give you as much as will pay for the benches, or for the tiers of seats resting on hired beams, or for the chairs in the front rows which will have to be returned when done with. Yet for all that, we poets stick to our task; we go on on drawing furrows in the thin soil, and turning up the shore with unprofitable plough. For if you would give it up, the itch for writing and making a name holds you fast as with a noose, and becomes inveterate in your distempered brain.

But your real poet, who has a vein of genius all his own—one who spins no hackneyed lays, and 141