Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/349

 though it had been puckered up by some Falernian turned sour. In the night, if his troubles grant him a short slumber, and his limbs, after tossing upon the bed, are sinking into repose, he straightway beholds the temple and the altar of the God whom he has outraged; and what weighs with chiefest ten-or on his soul, he sees you in his dreams; your awful form, larger than life, frightens his quaking heart and wrings confession from him. These are the men who tremble and grow pale at every lightning-flash; when it thunders, they quail at the first rumbling in the heavens; not as though it were an affair of chance or brought about by the raging of the winds, but as though the flame had fallen in wrath and as a judgment upon the earth. If one storm pass harmless by, they look more anxiously for the next, as though this calm were only a reprieve. If, again, they suffer from pains in the side, with a fever that robs them of their sleep, they believe that the sickness has been inflicted on them by the offended Deity; these they deem to be the missiles, these the arrows of the Gods. They dare not vow a bleating victim to a shrine, or offer a crested cock to the Lares; for what hope is permitted to the guilty sick? What victim is not more worthy of life than they? Inconstant and shifty, for the most part, is the nature of bad men. In committing a crime, they have courage enough and to spare; they only begin to feel what is right and what wrong when it has been committed. Yet nature, firm and changeless, returns to the ways which it has condemned. For who ever fixed a term to his own offending? When did a hardened brow ever recover the banished blush? What man have you ever seen that was satisfied with one act of 263