n admonition to reform his
conduct. Such an expedient would have only provoked the severest
resentment from his jealousy.----

PHAEDRUS was a native of Thrace, and was brought to Rome as a slave. He
had the good fortune to come into the service of Augustus, where,
improving his talents by reading, he obtained (249) the favour of the
emperor, and was made one of his freedmen. In the reign of Tiberius, he
translated into Iambic verse the Fables of Aesop. They are divided into
five books, and are not less conspicuous for precision and simplicity of
thought, than for purity and elegance of style; conveying moral
sentiments with unaffected ease and impressive energy. Phaedrus
underwent, for some time, a persecution from Sejanus, who, conscious of
his own delinquency, suspected that he was obliquely satirised in the
commendations bestowed on virtue by the poet. The work of Phaedrus is
one of the latest which have been brought to light since the revival of
learning. It remained in obscurity until two hundred years ago, when it
was discovered in a library at Rheims.----

HYGINUS is said to have been a native of Alexandria, or, according to
others, a Spaniard. He was, like Phaedrus, a freedman of Augustus; but,
though industrious, he seems not to have improved himself so much as his
companion, in the art of composition. He wrote, however, a mythological
history, under the title of Fables, a work called Poeticon Astronomicon,
with a treatise on agriculture, commentaries on Virgil, the lives of
eminent men, and some other productions now lost. His remaining works
are much mutilated, and, if genuine, afford an unfavourable specimen of
his elegance and correctness as a writer.

CELSUS was a physician in the time of Tiberius, and has written eight
books, De Medicina, in which he has collected and digested into order all
that is valuable on the subject, in the Greek and Roman authors. The
professors of Medicine were at that time divided into three sects, viz.,
the Dogmatists, Empirics, and Methodists; the first of whom deviated less
than the others from the plan of Hippocrates; but they were in general
irreconcilable to each other, in respect both of their opinions and
practice. Celsus, with great judgment, has occasionally adopted
particular doctrines from each of them; and whatever he admits into his
system, he not only establishes by the most rational observations, but
confirms by its practical utility. In justness o