plunge into the stream.  The sunny hillside is covered with vines, and from slope to hill-top the husbandmen call to each other and the wayfarer on the towpath or the bargemen floating by, shout their rude jests to the loitering vinedressers.  Far out in midstream the fisherman trails his dripping net and on a rock by the shore the angler plies his rod.  And, as twilight falls, the deepening shadow of the green hillside is reflected in the water and gazing downward the boatman can almost count the trembling vines and almost see the swelling of the grapes.

Equally peaceful, equally pleasant is life on Ausonius’ own estate in the Bordelais, his little patrimony (he calls it) although he had a thousand acres of vineyard and tillage and wood.  Miss Waddell has reminded us, on the authority of Saintsbury (whom else?) that ’to this day it boasts itself as Chateau-Ausone, one of the two best of the St Emilion clarets.’  Here he tends his roses and sends his boy round to the neighbours to bid them to luncheon, while he interviews the cook.  Six, including the host, is the right number—­if more it is not a meal but a melee.  Then there are all his relatives to be commemorated in verse, his grandfather and his grandmother and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts (especially his aunts).

And when the family circle palls there is the senior common room to fall back upon and the professors of Bordeaux to be celebrated in their turn.  Professors were important people in the empire of the fourth century; Symmachus says that it is the mark of a flourishing state that good salaries should be paid to professors; though what exactly we are to deduce from that in the light of history I should hesitate to say.  So Ausonius writes a collection of poems about the professors of Bordeaux.  There are thirty-two of them and all are celebrated.  There is Minervius the orator, who had a prodigious memory and after a game of backgammon was wont to conduct a post-mortem over every move.  There is Anastasius the grammarian, who was so foolish as to leave Bordeaux for a provincial university and thenceforth languished in well-merited obscurity.  There is Attius Tiro Delphidius, who retired from a legal career into the professorial chair, but could never be got to take any trouble with his men, to the disappointment of their parents.  There is Jocundus the grammarian, who did not really deserve his title, but was such a kind man that we will commemorate him among men of worth, although he was, strictly speaking, unequal to the job.  There is Exuperius, who was very good-looking and whose eloquence sounded superb until you examined it and found that it meant nothing.  There is Dynamius, who slipped from the paths of virtue with a married lady in Bordeaux and left the place rather hastily, but fortunately fell on his feet in Spain.  There is Victorius the usher, who liked only the most abstruse historical problems, such as what the pedigree of the sacrificial priest at Cureo was long before Numa’s day, or what Castor had to say on all the shadowy kings, and who never got up as far as Tully or Virgil, though he might have done so if he had gone on reading long enough, but death cut him off too soon.  They seem oddly familiar figures (except of course, Dynamius) and their chronicler contrives to make them live.