No More Learning

O soul, be changed into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!

[_Thunder. Enter_ DEVILS.

Oh, mercy, Heaven! Look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile!
Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books. O Mephistophilis!

[_Exeunt_ DEVILS _with_ FAUSTUS. _Enter_ CHORUS.

CHORUS: Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned Apollo's laurel-bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.
Faustus is gone. Regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practice more than heavenly power permits.
MARTIAL[Y]




Epigrams, Epitaphs and Poems




_I. --Satiric Pieces and Epigrams_


He unto whom thou art so partial,
O reader! is the well-known Martial,
The Epigrammatist: while living
Give him the fame thou wouldst be giving;
So shall he hear, and feel, and know it--
Post-obits rarely reach a poet. --_Byron_.


MARTIAL ON HIS WORK

Some things are good, some fair, but more you'll say
Are bad herein--all books are made that way!


FOOTNOTES:

[Y] Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) was born at Bilbilis,
in Spain, about 40 A. D. He went to Rome when twenty-four, and by
attaching himself to the influential family of his fellow Spaniards,
Seneca and Lucan, won his first introduction to Roman society. The
earliest of his books which we possess celebrates the games associated
with the dedication of the Flavian amphitheatre, the Colosseum,
by Titus, in 80 A. D. Most of his other books belong to the reign
of Domitian, to whom he cringed with fulsome adulation. After a
residence in Rome during thirty-four years, he returned to Spain. He
died probably soon after 102 A. D. Martial's importance to literature
rests chiefly on two facts. He made a permanent impress upon the
epigram by his gift of concise and vigorous utterance, culminating
in a characteristically sharp sting; and he left in his verses, even
where they are coarsest, an extraordinarily graphic index to the
pleasure-loving and often corrupt society of his day.