und them, these slaves had a
motive, such as our tenderly-treated (often pampered) servants can never
know the strength of, for breaking the seal of any wine cask. From the
anecdote told of his own mother by the wretched Quintus Cicero, the foul
brother of Marcus, it appears that generally there was some
encouragement to do this, on the chance of 'working down' on the master
that the violated seal had been amongst the casks legitimately opened.
For it seems that old Mrs. Cicero's housewifely plan was to seal up all
alike, empty and not empty. Consequently with her no such excuse could
avail. Which proves that often it _did_ avail, since her stratagem is
mentioned as a very notable artifice. What follows? Why, that the slave
was doubly tempted: 1st, by the luxury he witnessed; 2ndly, by the
impunity on which he might calculate. Often he escaped by sheer weight
of metal in lying. Like Chaucer's miller, he swore, when charged with
stealing flour, that it was not so. But this very prospect and
likelihood of escape was often the very snare for tempting to excesses
too flagrant or where secret marks had been fixed. Besides, many other
openings there were, according to the individual circumstances, but this
was a standing one, for tempting the poor unprincipled slave into
trespass that irritated either the master or the mistress. And then came
those periodical lacerations and ascending groans which Seneca mentions
as the best means of telling what o'clock it was in various households,
since the punishments were going on just at that hour.

After, when the gracious revolution of Christianity had taught us, and
by a memento so solemn and imperishable, no longer to pursue our human
wrath, that hour of vesper sanctity had come, which, by the tendency of
the Christian law and according to the degree in which it is observed,
is for us a type and a symbol and a hieroglyphic of wrath extinguished,
of self-conquest, of charity in heaven and on earth.

Now, the monks, it is supposable, might be commonplace drones. Often,
however, they would be far other, transmitters by their copying toils of
those very Ciceronian works which, but for them, would have perished.
And pausing duly here, what sense, what propriety would there be in
calling on the reader to notice with a shock the profanation of
classical ground in such an example as this: 'Mark the strange
revolutions of ages; there, where once the divine Plato's Academus
stood, now rises