er sit in
his own library with Atticus in their favourite seat under the bust of
Aristotle than in the curule chair". It is true that these longings for
retirement usually followed some political defeat or mortification; that
his natural sphere, the only life in which he could be really happy, was
in the keen excitement of party warfare--the glorious battle-field of the
Senate and the Forum. The true key-note of his mind is to be found in
these words to his friend Coelius: "Cling to the city, my friend, and
live in her light: all employment abroad, as I have felt from my earliest
manhood, is obscure and petty for those who have abilities to make them
famous at Rome". Yet the other strain had nothing in it of affectation, or
hypocrisy: it was the schoolboy escaped from work, thoroughly enjoying
his holiday, and fancying that nothing would be so delightful as to have
holidays always. In this, again, there was a similarity between Cicero's
taste and that of Horace. The poet loved his Sabine farm and all its rural
delights--after his fashion; and perhaps thought honestly that he loved it
more than he really did. Above all, he loved to write about it. With that
fancy, half-real, perhaps, and half-affected, for pastoral simplicity,
which has always marked a state of over-luxurious civilisation, he
protests to himself that there is nothing like the country. But perhaps
Horace discharges a sly jest at himself, in a sort of aside to his
readers, in the person of Alphius, the rich city money-lender, who is made
to utter that pretty apostrophe to rural happiness:

"Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled,
Who, living simply, like our sires of old,
Tills the few acres which his father tilled,
Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold".
Martin's 'Horace'

And who, after thus expatiating for some stanzas on the charms of the
country, calls in all his money one week in order to settle there, and
puts it all out again (no doubt at higher interest) the week after. "_O
rus, quando to aspiciam_!" has been the cry of public men before and
since Cicero's day, to whom, as to the great Roman, banishment from
political life, and condemnation to perpetual leisure, would have been a
sentence that would have crushed their very souls.

He was very happy at this time in his family. His wife and he loved one
another with an honest affection; anything more would have been out of the
natural course of things in Roman society at any date, and