than a well-cultivated estate; and, to the enjoyment of this, old age
is so far from being any hindrance, that it rather invites and allures us
to such pursuits".

He has no patience with what has been called the despondency of old
age--the feeling, natural enough at that time of life, but not desirable
to be encouraged, that there is no longer any room for hope or promise in
the future which gives so much of its interest to the present. He will not
listen to the poet when he says again--

"He plants the tree that shall not see the fruit"

The answer which he would make has been often put into other and more
elaborate language, but has a simple grandeur of its own. "If any should
ask the aged cultivator for whom he plants, let him not hesitate to make
this reply,--'For the immortal gods, who, as they willed me to inherit
these possessions from my forefathers, so would have me hand them on to
those that shall come after'".

The old Roman had not the horror of country society which so many
civilised Englishmen either have or affect. "I like a talk", he says,
"over a cup of wine". "Even when I am down at my Sabine estate, I
daily make one at a party of my country neighbours, and we prolong our
conversation very frequently far into the night". The words are put into
Cato's mouth, but the voice is the well-known voice of Cicero. We find
him here, as in his letters, persuading himself into the belief that the
secret of happiness is to be found in the retirement of the country. And
his genial and social nature beams through it all. We are reminded of his
half-serious complaints to Atticus of his importunate visitors at Formiae,
the dinner-parties which he was, as we say now, "obliged to go to", and
which he so evidently enjoyed.[1]

[Footnote 1: "A clergyman was complaining of the want of society in the
country where he lived, and said, 'They talk of _runts_' (i.e., young
cows). 'Sir', said Mr. Salusbury, 'Mr. Johnson would learn to talk of
runts;' meaning that I was a man who would make the most of my situation,
whatever it was".--Boswell's Life. Cicero was like Dr. Johnson.]

He is careful, however, to remind his readers that old age, to be really
either happy or venerable, must not be the old age of the mere voluptuary
or the debauchee; that the grey head, in order to be, even in his
pagan sense, "a crown of glory", must have been "found in the way of
righteousness". Shakespeare might have learned from Cicero in thes