im engage in the practise of oratory, even when an old man! What
pleasures, therefore, arising from banquets, or plays, or harlots, are
to be compared with these pleasures? And these, indeed, are the
pursuits of learning, which too, with the sensible and well educated,
increase along with their age; so that is a noble saying of Solon,
when he says in a certain verse, as I observed before, that he grew
old learning many things every day--than which pleasure of the mind,
certainly, none can be greater.

I come now to the pleasures of husbandmen, with which I am excessively
delighted, which are not checked by any old age, and appear in my
mind to make the nearest approach to the life of a wise man. For they
have relation to the earth, which never refuses command, and never
returns without interest that which it hath received; but sometimes
with less, generally with very great interest. And yet for my part it
is not only the product, but the virtue and nature of the earth itself
that delight me, which, when in its softened and subdued bosom it has
received the scattered seed, first of all confines what is hidden
within it, from which harrowing, which produces that effect, derives
its name (_occatio_); then, when it is warmed by heat and its own
compression, it spreads it out, and elicits from it the verdant blade,
which, supported by the fibers of the roots, gradually grows up, and,
rising on a jointed stalk, is now enclosed in a sheath, as if it were
of tender age, out of which, when it hath shot up, it then pours forth
the fruit of the ear, piled in due order, and is guarded by a rampart
of beards against the pecking of the smaller birds. Why should I, in
the case of vines, tell of the plantings, the risings, the stages of
growth? That you may know the repose and amusement of my old age, I
assure you that I can never have enough of that gratification. For I
pass over the peculiar nature of all things which are produced from
the earth; which generates such great trunks and branches from so
small a grain of the fig or from the grape-stone, or from the minutest
seeds of other fruits and roots; shoots, plants, twigs, quicksets,
layers, do not these produce the effect of delighting any one even to
admiration? The vine, indeed, which by nature is prone to fall, and is
borne down to the ground, unless it be propt, in order to raise
itself up, embraces with its tendrils, as it were with hands, whatever
it meets with, which, as it