the heir should carry to the grave upon his
naked shoulders her body oiled all over; he had stuck to her all her
life, and she hoped to shake him off for a moment after death. He
enforces the virtue of moderation and contentment from Aesop's fables,
of the frog, of the daw with borrowed plumage, of the lean weasel who
squeezed himself into a granary through a tiny hole, and grew so fat
that he could not return; from the story of Philippus, who amused
himself by enriching a poor man to the ruin of his victim's peace and
happiness (Ep. I, vii, 46); and from the delightful apologue of the
City and the Country Mouse (Sat. II, vi). He denounces the folly of
miserliness from the example of the ant, provident in amassing store,
but restful in fruition of it when amassed; reproves ill-natured
judgement of one's neighbours almost in the words of Prior, bidding
us be to their faults a little blind and to their virtues very kind,
softening their moral blemishes as lovers and mothers euphemize a dear
one's physical defects. (Sat. I, iii) "You will not listen to me?" he
stops now and then to say; "I shall continue to cry on all the same
until I rouse you, as the audience in the theatre did the other day"
(Sat. II, iii, 60). For it seems that one Fufius, a popular actor,
assumed in a tragedy the part of Trojan Ilione, whose cue was to fall
asleep upon the stage until roused with a whisper of "Mother awake!"
by the ghost of her dead son Deiphilus. Poor Fufius was tipsy, fell
asleep in earnest, and was insensible to the ghost's appeal, until
the audience, entering into the fun, unanimously shouted, "Wake up,
Mother!" Some of you, I know, he goes on, will listen, even as Polemon
did (Sat. II, iii, 254). Returning from a debauch, the young profligate
passed the Academy where Xenocrates was lecturing, and burst riotously
in. Presently, instead of scoffing, he began to hearken; was touched
and moved and saddened, tore off conscience-stricken his effeminate
ornaments, long sleeves, purple leggings, cravat, the garland from his
head, the necklace from his throat; came away an altered and converted
man. One thinks of a poem by Rossetti, and of something further back
than that; for did we not hear the story from sage Mr. Barlow's lips,
in our Sandford and Merton salad days?

In the earlier Satires his personalities are sometimes gross:
chatterbox Fabius, scattercash Nomentanus, blear-eyed Crispinus,
Hermogenes the fop, Pantolabus the trencher