This is comprehensive, if not encouraging.  That “facultatem impendendi” is a tremendous bolster to farming as to anything else; it is only another shape of the “poterit,” and the “poterit" only a scholarly rendering of pounds and pence.  As if Tremellius had said,—­That man will make his way at farming who understands the business, who has the money to apply to it, and who is willing to bleed freely.

With a kindred sagacity this shrewd Roman advises a man to slip upon his farm often, in order that his steward may keep sharply at his work; he even suggests that the landlord make a feint of coming, when he has no intention thereto, that he may gain a day’s alertness from the bailiff.  The book is of course a measure of the advances made in farming during the two hundred years elapsed since Cato’s time; but those advances were not great.  There was advance in power to systematize facts, advance in literary aptitude, but no very noticeable gain in methods of culture.  Columella gives the results of wider observation, and of more persistent study; but, for aught I can see, a man could get a crop of lentils as well with Cato as with Columbia; a man would house his flocks and servants as well out of the one as the other; in short, a man would grow into the “facultatem impendendi” as swiftly under the teachings of the Senator as of the later writer of the reign of Tiberius.

It is but dull work to follow those teachings; here and there I warm into a little sympathy, as I catch sight, in his Latin dress, of our old friend Curculio; here and there I sniff a fruit that seems familiar,—­as the fraga, or a morum; and here and there comes blushing into the crabbed text the sweet name of some home-flower,—­a lily, a narcissus, or a rose.  The chief value of the work of Columella, however, lies in its clear showing-forth of the relative importance given to different crops, under Roman culture, and to the raising of cattle, poultry, fish, etc.; as compared with crops.  Knowing this, we know very much that will help us toward an estimate of the domestic life of the Romans.  We learn, with surprise, how little they regarded their oxen, save as working-animals,—­whether the milk-white steers of Clitumnus, or the dun Campanian cattle, whose descendants show their long-horned stateliness to this day in the Roman forum.  The sheep, too, whether of Tarentum or of Canusium, were regarded as of value chiefly for their wool and milk; and it is surely amazing, that men who could appreciate the iambics of Horace and the eloquence of Cicero should have shown so little fancy for a fat saddle of mutton or for a mottled sirloin of beef.

I change from Columella to Virgil, and from Virgil back to some pleasant Idyl of Tibullus, and from Tibullus to the pretty prate of Horace about the Sabine Hills; I stroll through Pliny’s villa, eying the clipped box-trees; I hear the rattle in the tennis-court; I watch the tall Roman girls—­