Maecenas, the subject of my earliest song, justly entitled to my latest, dost thou seek to engage me again in the old lists, having been tried sufficiently, and now presented with the foils?  My age is not the same, nor is my genius.  Veianius, his arms consecrated on a pillar of Hercules’ temple, lives snugly retired in the country, that he may not from the extremity of the sandy amphitheater so often supplicate the people’s favor.  Some one seems frequently to ring in my purified ear:  “Wisely in time dismiss the aged courser, lest, an object of derision, he miscarry at last, and break his wind.”  Now therefore I lay aside both verses, and all other sportive matters; my study and inquiry is after what is true and fitting, and I am wholly engaged in this:  I lay up, and collect rules which I may be able hereafter to bring into use.  And lest you should perchance ask under what leader, in what house [of philosophy], I enter myself a pupil:  addicted to swear implicitly to the ipse-dixits of no particular master, wherever the weather drives me, I am carried a guest.  One while I become active, and am plunged in the waves of state affairs, a maintainer and a rigid partisan of strict virtue; then again I relapse insensibly into Aristippus’ maxims, and endeavor to adapt circumstances to myself, not myself to circumstances.  As the night seems long to those with whom a mistress has broken her appointment, and the day slow to those who owe their labor; as the year moves lazy with minors, whom the harsh guardianship of their mothers confines; so all that time to me flows tedious and distasteful, which delays my hope and design of strenuously executing that which is of equal benefit to the poor and to the rich, which neglected will be of equal detriment to young and to old.  It remains, that I conduct and comfort myself by these principles; your sight is not so piercing as that of Lynceus; you will not however therefore despise being anointed, if you are sore-eyed:  nor because you despair of the muscles of the invincible Glycon, will you be careless of preserving your body from the knotty gout.  There is some point to which we may reach, if we can go no further.  Does your heart burn with avarice, and a wretched desire of more?  Spells there are, and incantations, with which you may mitigate this pain, and rid yourself of a great part of the distemper.  Do you swell with the love of praise?  There are certain purgations which can restore you, a certain treatise, being perused thrice with purity of mind.  The envious, the choleric, the indolent, the slave to wine, to women—­none is so savage that he can not be tamed, if he will only lend a patient ear to discipline.