his life in the famous eruption of Vesuvius.  He was lord high admiral of the Mediterranean west of Italy; and of course when the eruption was reported at Misenum, at the admiralty-house, he must needs view it.  It was too remarkable a thing not to have a high place in his Natural History.  He ordered out his light galley.  The rest we all know—­how the admiral was as brave as he was fat, and seeing the danger in which so many friends with whom he had often supped were put, attempted to help some of them.  So, because of the widow Rectina and his good friend Pomponianus, he came to his sad death.

It was not so very great a loss to his nephew, now turned of eighteen—­a likely youth, of course well connected, and now his uncle’s heir.  Caius Pliny went through the steps of the civil service with credit to himself, though his advancement was checked during Domitian’s reign.  He was indeed a consul, but then many consuls were appointed during the year.  But it was much more prudent for him to keep quiet.  He had a good practice—­for this, though not strictly accurate, is the nearest term by which to designate his legal employment—­and, to take a leap beyond the time we are speaking of, he was about twenty-five years afterward governor of Bithynia, whence he wrote his famous letter to the emperor Trajan about the Christians in his province.  Of this letter much has been said, but we think that Pliny has not always been rightly judged about it.  He was too conservative a man to be a persecutor, but was not much above or beyond his own time.  And he wrote of the Christians as being a religio illicita—­an illegal assembly of heretics—­as regarded the state religion, which it was his duty to defend.  It was wrong to persecute the Christians—­wrong on general principles, wrong on particular axioms.  But, alas! it has taken nearly seventeen more centuries of fiercer persecutors than Pliny proved to be to learn this little fact.  All this is, as he would have said, obiter—­by the way.  It has, however, a good deal to do indirectly with his good living; for, as we were saying, C.P.C.  Secundus lived very well indeed—­not extravagantly, but comfortably.

Now, to live well or comfortably, it is needful to have something wherewith to live thus comfortably.  The start which C.P.  Secundus gave C.P.C.  Secundus lifted him up into a successful lawyer, a sort of public orator.  As heir to his uncle’s estate, and as coheir to estates of deceased friends, and as a public man, he amassed considerable property.  He could undoubtedly—­and we undoubtingly believe he did—­do this with scrupulous honesty.  His fees, salaries and legacies he took pains to earn.  Legacies he claimed as they were left him, though he stooped to no fawning to obtain them, and in at least one instance returned the property to the natural (though he says undeserving) heir.  If so, let us give him due credit for generosity.  Certainly, he was not selfish or illiberal.  He