ding their secrets?

_Ternissa._ Epicurus, you are in the right to bring it away from
Athens, from under the eye of Pallas: she might be angry.

_Epicurus._ You approve of its removal then, my lovely friend?

_Ternissa._ Mightily. [_Aside._] I wish it may break in pieces on the
road.

_Epicurus._ What did you say?

_Ternissa._ I wish it were now on the road, that I might try whether
it would hold me--I mean with my clothes on.

_Epicurus._ It would hold you, and one a span longer. I have another
in the house; but it is not decorated with fauns and satyrs and
foliage, like this.

_Leontion._ I remember putting my hand upon the frightful satyr's
head, to leap in: it seems made for the purpose. But the sculptor
needed not to place the naiad quite so near--he must have been a very
impudent man; it is impossible to look for a moment at such a piece of
workmanship.

_Ternissa._ For shame! Leontion!--why, what was it? I do not desire to
know.

_Epicurus._ I don't remember it.

_Leontion._ Nor I neither; only the head.

_Epicurus._ I shall place the satyr toward the rock, that you may
never see him, Ternissa.

_Ternissa._ Very right; he cannot turn round.

_Leontion._ The poor naiad had done it, in vain.

_Ternissa._ All these labourers will soon finish the plantation, if
you superintend them, and are not appointed to some magistrature.

_Epicurus._ Those who govern us are pleased at seeing a philosopher
out of the city, and more still at finding in a season of scarcity
forty poor citizens, who might become seditious, made happy and quiet
by such employment.

Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition:
never to be listened to, and to be listened to always. Aware of
these, I devote a large portion of my time and labours to the
cultivation of such minds as flourish best in cities, where my garden
at the gate, although smaller than this, we find sufficiently
capacious. There I secure my listeners; here my thoughts and
imaginations have their free natural current, and tarry or wander as
the will invites: may it ever be among those dearest to me!--those
whose hearts possess the rarest and divinest faculty, of retaining or
forgetting at option what ought to be forgotten or retained.

_Leontion._ The whole ground then will be covered with trees and
shrubs?

_Epicurus._ There are some protuberances in various parts of the
eminence, which you do not perceive till you are upon them or abov