And yet in his fine devotion to
his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller,
what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so false to its
office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of
fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of
man's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and
persevere in the same character. History serves us well to this
effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular
epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make
us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity
of man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognise
their own human virtues and defects in strange forms, often
inverted and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a
poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his
works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious
passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman.
It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these
pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found
them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand things
that help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of
the great Roman Empire.
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