Page:Satires, Epistles, Art of Poetry of Horace - Coningsby (1874).djvu/224



''Hail to your majesty! yet, ne'ertheless,'' Rude boys are pulling at your beard, I guess. Those commentators are clearly right who understand "vellunt," not of what the boys are apt to do, but of what they are actually doing, while the Stoic is talking and making himself out to be a king.

Say, you're first cousin to that goodly pair, Cælius and Birrius, and their foibles share. Cælius and Birrius were a couple of robbers, a fact distinctly mentioned in the Latin, and, I hope, capable of being inferred from the context of the English.

After life's endless babble they sleep well. I need hardly refer to the well-known line in Macbeth.

Cassius the rake, and Mænius the buffoon. This is nearly identical with a line in Howes, of which it may very possibly be an unconscious remembrance. Here and in other places I have called Nomentanus, metri gratia, by his family name Cassius, though it is nowhere, I believe, applied to him by Horace. Pantolabus is supposed to be the same as Mænius, whom Horace mentions elsewhere, and I have been only too glad to take the supposition for granted. Generally, where a Horatian personage is known to have had two names, I have used that one which the exigences of the verse recommended.

''O heaven-abandoned wretch! is all this care.'' O inconsistent wretch! is all this coil. Author:William Gifford Juvenal, Sat. xiv.