augur, and how, having changed
his toga, he never left the old man's side till he died; and he recalls
how once, sitting with him in a circle with friends, Scaevola fell into
that mode of conversation which was usual with him, and told him how
once Laelius had discoursed to them on friendship. It is from first to
last fresh and green and cooling, as is the freshness of the early
summer grass to men who live in cities. The reader feels, as he goes on
with it, that he who had such thoughts and aspirations could never have
been altogether unhappy. Coming at the end of his life, in the telling
the stories of which we have had to depend so much on his letters to
Atticus, it reminds me of the love that existed between them. He has
sometimes been querulous with his Atticus. He has complained of bad
advice, of deficient care, of halting friendship--in reading which
accusations we have, all of us, declared him to be wrong. But Atticus
understood him. He knew that the privileges and the burden must go
together, and told himself how much more than sufficient were the
privileges to compensate the burden. When we make our histories on the
bases of such loving letters, we should surely open them with careful
hands, and deal with them in sympathy with their spirit. In writing this
treatise De Amicitia especially for the eyes of Atticus, how constantly
the heart must have gone back to all that had passed between them--how
confident he must have been of the truth of his friend! He who, after
nearly half a century of friendship, could thus write to his friend on
friendship cannot have been an unhappy man.

"Should a new friendship spring up," he tells us, "let it not be
repressed. You shall still gather fruit from young trees; but do not let
it take the place of the old. Age and custom will have given the old
fruit a flavor of its own. Who is there that would ride a new horse in
preference to one tried--one who knows your hand?"[318]

I regard the De Officiis as one of the most perfect treatises on morals
which the world possesses, whether for the truth of the lessons given,
for their universality, or for the beauty and lightness of the language.
It is on a subject generally heavy, but is treated with so much art and
grace as to make it a delight to have read it, and an important part of
education to know it. It is addressed to his son, and is as good now as
when it was written. There is not a precept taught in it which is not
modern a