i_, if her age bore suitable relation to that
of her husband. The ripe maturity of many of the rural writers I have
introduced cannot fail to strike one. Thus, Xenophon gained a strength
in his Elian fields that carried him into the nineties; Cato lived to be
over eighty; and now we have Varro, writing his book out by Tusculum at
eighty, and surviving to counsel with Fundania ten years more. Pliny,
too, (the elder,) who, if not a farmer, had his country-seats, and left
very much to establish our acquaintance with the Roman rural life, was
a hale, much-enduring man, of such soldierly habits and large
abstemiousness as to warrant a good fourscore,--if he had not fallen
under that murderous cloud of ashes from Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79.

The poets, doubtless, burnt out earlier, as they usually do. Virgil,
whom I shall come to speak of presently, certainly did: he died at
fifty-one. Tibullus, whose opening Idyl is as pretty a bit of gasconade
about living in a cottage in the country, upon love and a few
vegetables, as a maiden could wish for, did not reach the fifties; and
Martial, whose "Faustine Villa," if nothing else, entitles him to rural
oblation, fell short of the sixties.

Varro indulges in some sharp sneers at those who had written on the same
subject before him. This was natural enough in a man of his pursuits: he
had written four hundred books!

Of Columella we know scarcely more than that he lived somewhere about
the time of Tiberius, that he was a man of wealth, that he travelled
extensively through Gaul, Italy, and Greece, observing intelligently
different methods of culture, and that he has given the fullest existing
compend of ancient agriculture. In his chapter upon Gardening he warms
into hexameters; but the rest is stately and euphonious prose. In his
opening chapter, he does not forego such praises of the farmer's life
as sound like a lawyer's address before a county-society on a fair-day.
Cincinnatus and his plough come in for it; and Fabricius and Curius
Dentatus; with which names, luckily, our orators cannot whet their
periods, since Columella's mention of them is about all we know of their
farming.

He falls into the way, moreover, of lamenting, as people obstinately
continue to do, the "good old times," when men were better than "now,"
and when the reasonable delights of the garden and the fields engrossed
them to the neglect of the circus and the theatres. But when he opens
upon his subjec