e
And diligence, will have all sent
To you, for a like punishment.
Hence, poets! with your jingling chimes:
Hence, miserables! halt and lame;
Be off, ye troublers of our times!
I send you packing whence ye came.

GRATIAN.--Kicking about the volumes, doubtless, as the "Friend of
Humanity" did the "Needy Knife-grinder."

CURATE.--I did not translate that--for I thought the authors might
easily have been burned for writing bad verses (no hint to you,
Aquilius; nothing personal); and that Calvus Licinius, having that
remedy, need not have written about them. And I confess I don't see much
in what he has written. This Suffenus, however, was no fool, but a man
of wit and sense.

AQUILIUS.--Yes,--and Catullus writes to Varrus specially about him. I
have translated that too. Here it is:--

AD VARRUM.

This man Suffenus, whom you know,
Varrus, is not without some show
Of parts, and gift of speech befitting
A man of sense. Yet he mistakes
His talents wondrously, and makes
His thousand verses at a sitting.
And troth, he makes them _look_ their best:
For, not content with palimpsest,
He has them writ on royal vellum,
Emboss'd and gilded, rubb'd and polish'd:
But read 'em, and you wish abolish'd
The privilege to make or sell 'em.
You read them, and the man is quite
Another man: no more polite--
No more "the man about the town,"
But metamorphosed to a clown--
Milker of goats, a hedger, digger,
So thoroughly is changed his figure,
So quite unlike himself. 'Tis odd,
Most strange, the man for wit so noted,
Whose repartees so much were quoted,
Is changed into a very clod!
And stranger still--he never seems
Quite to himself to be himself,
As when of poetry he dreams,
And writes and writes, and fills his reams
With poems destined for the shelf.
We are deceived--in this twin-brothers
All. There's one vanity between us,
And our self-knowledge stands to screen us
From our true portraits. Knowing others,
We ticket each man with his vice;
And find, most accurately nice,
In all a something of Suffenus.
Thus every man one knowledge lacks;
Our error is--we read the score
Of each man as he walks before,
And bear our tickets at our backs.

GRATIAN.--True, indeed--as old fables mostly are. There is in them the
depth of wisdom acquired by experience