Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/455



is the fashion of poets to call for a hundred voices, a hundred mouths and a hundred tongues for their lays, whether their theme be a play to be gaped out by a lugubrious tragedian, or a wounded Parthian plucking an arrow from his groin.

"What are you driving at? What are these big lumps of solid poetry that you would cram down the throat so as to need a hundred throat-power to grapple with them? Let those who meditate lofty themes gather vapours on Mount Helicon, if there be any who propose to set a-boiling the pot of Procne or of Thyestes, whereby that dullard Glyco may be provided with his nightly supper. But you are not one that squeezes the wind like the bellows of a forge when ore is a-smelting, nor are you one who croaks to himself some solemn nonsense with hoarse mutterings like a crow; nor do you swell out your cheeks till they burst with an 369