He is forever anticipating persecution and martyrdom; fingering, as it were, the flames, to try how he can bear them.

Perhaps his premature defiance sometimes made him obnoxious to censures which he would otherwise have slipped by.
The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to attract in the present day.

It is certainly not such as we should expect from a poet "soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and his singing robes about him;"[1] nor is it such as he has shown in his _Philarete_, and in some parts of his _Shepherds Hunting_.

He seems to have adopted this dress with voluntary humility, as fittest for a moral teacher, as our divines choose sober gray or black; but in their humility consists their sweetness.

The deepest tone of moral feeling in them (though all throughout is weighty, earnest, and passionate) is in those pathetic injunctions against shedding of blood in quarrels, in the chapter entitled _Revenge_.