The writer entreats his friend to have too much self-respect to adopt a line of life so utterly distasteful to any man of independent spirit. "Is there no pulse still growing," he asks indignantly—"no wholesome herbs on which a man may sustain life, no streams of pure water left, that you should he driven to this direst strait for existence?" If a man will deliberately choose such a life, he bids him not rail at his fate hereafter, as many do, but remember those words of Plato,—"Heaven is blameless—the fault lies in our own choice."
It must be borne in mind that we here are reading satire, and not social history, and that it would be unfair to judge of the common position of literary men in the houses of the great from this highly coloured sketch of Lucian's. No doubt there were still to be found hosts like Mæcenas wherever there were companions like Horace. Few readers can have followed these extracts from Lucian's description of the literary dependant of his own day, without having forcibly recalled to them Macaulay's well-known picture of the domestic chaplain of the days of the Stuarts. There is abundant material for that brilliant caricature to be found, of course, in the satirists and the comedy-writers of those times,—the Lucians of the day; and they no doubt could have pointed to the original of every feature in their portraits. If does not follow that such portraits are to be taken as fair representatives of a class. But we must remember that the lively author we have now before us did not profess to be writing history; and it is well not to forget in reading the English
