enty-six years of age, at which
time he died.----

PERSIUS was born at Volaterrae, of an equestrian family, about the
beginning of the Christian aera. His father dying when he was six years
old, he was left to the care of his mother, for whom and for his sisters
he expresses the warmest affection. At the age of twelve he came to
Rome, where, after attending a course of grammar and rhetoric under the
respective masters of those branches of education, he placed himself
under the tuition of Annaeus Cornutus, a celebrated stoic philosopher of
that time. There subsisted between him and this preceptor so great a
friendship, that at his death, which happened in the twenty-ninth year of
his age, he bequeathed to Cornutus a handsome sum of money, and his
library. The latter, however, accepting only the books, left the money
to Persius's sisters.

Priscian, Quintilian, and other ancient writers, spear of Persius's
satires as consisting of a book without any division. They have since,
however, been generally divided into six different satires, but by some
only into five. The subjects of these compositions are, the vanity of
the poets in his time; the backwardness of youth to the cultivation of
moral science; ignorance and temerity in political administration,
chiefly in allusion to the government of Nero: the fifth satire is
employed in evincing that the wise man also is free; in discussing which
point, the author adopts the observations used by Horace on the same
subject. The last satire of Persius is directed against avarice. In the
fifth, we meet with a beautiful address to Cornutus, whom the author
celebrates for his amiable virtues, and peculiar talents for teaching.
The following lines, at the same time that they show how diligently the
preceptor and his pupil were employed through the whole day in the
cultivation of moral science, afford a more agreeable picture of domestic
comfort and philosophical conviviality, than might be expected in the
family of a rigid stoic:

Tecum etenim longos memini consumere soles,
Et tecum primas epulis decerpere noctes.
Unum opus, et requiem pariter disponimus ambo:
Atque verecunda laxamus feria mensa.--Sat. v.

Can I forget how many a summer's day,
Spent in your converse, stole, unmarked, away?
Or how, while listening with increased delight,
I snatched from feasts the earlier hours of night?--Gifford.

The satires of Persius are written in a fre