Now, gentle reader, yourself being judge, we submit to your honor that here are good sense, delicate taste and refinement combined.  Two things also must be noted:  First, we are glad to find that the well-disposed youth to whom we were introduced in Mr. Adams’s Latin Grammar some twenty-odd years ago turns out to be this kindly young man in whom C.P.C.  Secundus, Jr., takes such an interest:  we are sure he is a deserving young man, and will turn out a brilliant diner-out; only it would have been more ingenuous in Mr. Adams to have told us plainly that it was Avitus whose character was being formed by the famous C.P.C.  Secundus, generally known as Pliny the Younger; and then we might have profited by the tuition.  Again, the freedman was not one in the sense in which we use the term, but one who was emancipated and a member (not always a menial member) of his patron’s family.  The African as a slave had just begun to be a common servant in wealthy households, but the libertus was often of better blood than many a citizen.  You will remember that Horace was the son of such a freedman.  So again we hold it proven that Pliny knew how to enjoy his opportunities of good living—­opportunities acquired partly by inheritance, partly by his ability and deserts.  He had a well-balanced, self-poised character, and so could trust himself temperare gulce—­to eat, drink and enjoy life temperately.  He was tested in the troublous times of Domitian.  By living quietly, by adroitly parrying pointed and dangerous questions, by avoiding public life, he managed to pass through a very difficult reign; for it was a difficult time under an emperor who spared not even flies:  certainly it was the only way in which he ever battled with Beelzebub.  Now we hold that had C.P.C.  Secundus been anything beyond an amateur epicure—­if he had been a gourmand—­he would have fatally said or done something that would have prevented his ever writing any more letters to friends or to General Trajanus.  To be a well-balanced eater is, cceteris paribus, to be a well-balanced man.  Perhaps Pliny was too fastidious to be a proper epicure even—­too fastidious in other directions, we mean.  And he had learned some habits from his early training which would interfere materially with habitual attention to the pleasures of the table.  But we protest we did not intend, even as a first object, to bring up the table as the main proof of Pliny’s enjoyment of the good things of this life.  We wanted to show you, courteous reader, something of how he lived, and it is necessary to learn his habits in order to decide whether he enjoyed the things which Providence had given him.  He had learned of his uncle the bad habit of reading or of being read to at meal-times.  He did not indulge in it, he says, when he had company, but only when his family was present.  His protestation does not avail him:  this plea rather aggravated the rudeness.  For, however formal etiquette may