Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/415

 'No nuisance here,' you say; paint up a couple of snakes, my lads, and clear out; the ground is holy, and I'll be off."

"And yet Lucilius flayed our city: he flayed you, Lupus, and you, Mucius, and broke his jaw over you. Horace, sly dog, worming his way playfully into the vitals of his laughing friend, touches up his every fault; a rare hand he at flinging out his nose and hanging the people on it! And may I not mutter one word? Not anywhere, to myself, nor even to a ditch? Yes—here will I dig it in. I have seen the truth; I have seen it with my own eyes, O my book: Who is there who has not the ears of an ass? this dead secret of mine, this poor little joke, I will not sell for all your Iliads!

"O all ye that have caught the bold breath of Cratinus—ye who haye grown pale over the blasts of Eupolis or of the Grand Old Man —look here too, if you have an ear for anything of the finer sort. Let my reader be one whose ear has been cleansed and kindled by such strains, not one of the baser sort who loves to poke fun at the slippers of the Greeks, and who could cry out 'Old one-eye!' to a one-eyed man; nor yet one puffed up with his dignity as a provincial aedile who deems himself somebody because he has broken up short pint measures 329