) is not only the most
obscure, but the most obscene, of all his works. I understood it,
but for that reason turned it over. In defence of his boisterous
metaphors he quotes Longinus, who accounts them as instruments of
the sublime, fit to move and stir up the affections, particularly in
narration; to which it may be replied that where the trope is far-
fetched and hard, it is fit for nothing but to puzzle the
understanding, and may be reckoned amongst those things of
Demosthenes which AEschines called [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] not [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]--that is,
prodigies, not words. It must be granted to Casaubon that the
knowledge of many things is lost in our modern ages which were of
familiar notice to the ancients, and that satire is a poem of a
difficult nature in itself, and is not written to vulgar readers;
and (through the relation which it has to comedy) the frequent
change of persons makes the sense perplexed, when we can but divine
who it is that speaks--whether Persius himself, or his friend and
monitor, or, in some places, a third person.
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