a candid excuse for those failings which are incident to youth and
inexperience; and we have more reason to wonder how they, who died
before the thirtieth year of their age, could write so well and
think so strongly, than to accuse them of those faults from which
human nature (and more especially in youth) can never possibly be
exempted.

To consider Persius yet more closely: he rather insulted over vice
and folly than exposed them like Juvenal and Horace; and as chaste
and modest as he is esteemed, it cannot be denied but that in some
places he is broad and fulsome, as the latter verses of the fourth
satire and of the sixth sufficiently witness. And it is to be
believed that he who commits the same crime often and without
necessity cannot but do it with some kind of pleasure.

To come to a conclusion: he is manifestly below Horace because he
borrows most of his greatest beauties from him; and Casaubon is so
far from denying this that he has written a treatise purposely
concerning it, wherein he shows a multitude of his translations from
Horace, and his imitations of him, for the credit of his author,
which he calls "Imitatio Horatiana."

To these defects (which I casually observed while I was translating
this author) Scaliger has added others; he calls him in plain terms
a silly writer and a trifler, full of ostentation of his learning,
and, after all, unworthy to come into competition with Juvenal and
Horace.

After such terrible accusations, it is time to hear what his patron
Casaubon can allege in his defence. Instead of answering, he