one offers
difficulties for invention, the other is obvious and easy, and for
that reason also is to be scorned.

Moreover, falsehood occurs not only in propositions but also in the
delineation of feeling, as, for instance, when feelings are ascribed
to a character other than those which nature and the subject-matter
demand. You will find this fault in an epigram by Vulteius, which was
for this reason rejected:

I viewed one day the marble stone
That hides a man in sin well-known.
I sighed and said, "What is the point
Of such expense? This tomb might serve
To house kings and the blood of kings
That now conceals a villainous corpse."
I burst in tears that copiously
Flowed from my eyes down both my cheeks.
A stander-by took me to task
In some such words, I think, as these:
"Aren't you ashamed, be who you may,
To mourn the burial of this plague?"
But I replied, "My tears are shed
For the lost tomb, not his lost head."[9]

It was surely foreign to nature to represent a man weeping copiously
because a villain and scoundrel had been buried in a noble tomb, for
the funeral honors paid to scoundrels excite anger and indignation
rather than pity and tears. The poet, consequently, adopted an
erroneous feeling when he wept where he should have been angry and
wrathful.

_On mythological epigrams._

Untruth, then, is a considerable fault, one that is quite widespread
and one that embraces many sub-divisions. Under this category falls
especially the use of mythological propositions, the common vehicle of
poets when they have nothing to say. We have rejected many epigrams
that are faulty in this kind, as, for example, Grotius on the Emperor
Rudolph, which is too crowded with myths:

Not Mars alone has favored you, Invincible,
At whom as enemy barbarian standards shake,
But the Divine Community with gifts adore you,
And with this in especial from the wife of Zephyr:
She to the Dutch Apelles did perpetual spring
Ordain, and meadows living by the painter's hand.
Alcinous' charm is annual, and Adonis' gardens,
Nor do the Pharian roses bloom long in that air;
Antique Pomona of Semiramis has boasted,
And yet deep winter climbs the summit of her roof.
How shall your honors fail? The garlands that you wear
Beseem Imperial triumph, which time may not touch.[10]

I know there are other things to be censured in this epigram