Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/351

 villainy? Our scoundrel will yet put his feet into the snare; he will have to endure the dark prison-house and the staple, or one of those crags in the Aegaean sea that are crowded with our noble exiles. You will exult over the stern punishment of a hated name, and at length admit with joy that none of the Gods is deaf or like unto Tiresias.

are many things of ill repute, friend Fuscinus,—things that would affix a lasting stain to the brightest of lives, —which parents themselves point out and hand on to their sons. If the aged father delights in ruinous play, his heir too gambles in his teens, and rattles the selfsame weapons in a tiny dice-box. If a youth has learnt from the hoary gluttony of a spendthrift father to peel truffles, to preserve mushrooms, and to souse beccaficoes in their own juice, none of his relatives need expect better things of him when he grows up. As soon as he has passed his seventh year, before he has cut all his second teeth, though you put a thousand bearded preceptors on his right hand, and as many on his left, he will always long to fare sumptuously, and not fall below the high standard of "his cookery.

When Rutilus delights in the sound of a cruel flogging, deeming it sweeter than any siren's song, and being himself a very Antiphates, or a Polyphemus, to his trembling household, is he inculcating 265