dingly apt to keep their vital fire burning _with the blower up_.

----So far without Tully. But in the mean time I have been reading the
treatise, "De Senectute." It is not long, but a leisurely performance.
The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when he addressed it to
his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person of distinction, some two
or three years older. We read it when we are schoolboys, forget all
about it for thirty years, and then take it up again by a natural
instinct,--provided always that we read Latin as we drink water, without
stopping to taste it, as all of us who ever learned it at school or
college ought to do.

Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue. A good deal of it is what
would be called in vulgar phrase "slow." It unpacks and unfolds
incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look at the back
of, and toss each to its pigeonhole. I think ancient classics and
ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind of expansion.

An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some
contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans. As the patient
would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull work to sit
with his hands in his lap. Reading, the ingenious inventor suggested,
would be an agreeable mode of passing the time. He mentioned, in his
written account of his contrivance, various works that might amuse the
weary hour. I remember only three,--Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and _Watts
on the Mind_.

It is not generally understood that Cicero's essay was delivered as a
lyceum lecture, (_concio popularis_,) at the Temple of Mercury. The
journals (_papyri_) of the day ("Tempora Quotidiana,"--"Tribunus
Quirinalis,"--"Praeco Romanus," and the rest) gave abstracts of it, one
of which I have translated and modernized, as being a substitute for the
analysis I intended to make.

IV. Kal. Mart....

The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well attended
by the _elite_ of our great city. Two hundred thousand sestertia were
thought to have been represented in the house. The doors were besieged
by a mob of shabby fellows, (_illotum vulgus_,) who were at length
quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (_gladio
jugulati_). The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,--the
subject, Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very
unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname
of _chick-pea_ (Cicero