—­So far without Tully.  But in the mean time I have been reading the treatise, “De Senectute.”  It is not long, but a leisurely performance.  The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when he addressed it to his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person of distinction, some two or three years older.  We read it when we are schoolboys, forget all about it for thirty years, and then take it up again by a natural instinct,—­provided always that we read Latin as we drink water, without stopping to taste it, as all of us who ever learned it at school or college ought to do.

Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue.  A good deal of it is what would be called in vulgar phrase “slow.”  It unpacks and unfolds incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look at the back of, and toss each to its pigeon-hole.  I think ancient classics and ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind of expansion.

An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans.  As the patient would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull work to sit with his hands in his lap.  Reading, the ingenious inventor suggested, would be an agreeable mode of passing the time.  He mentioned, in his written account of his contrivance, various works that might amuse the weary hour.  I remember only three,—­Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and Watts on the mind.

It is not generally understood that Cicero’s essay was delivered as a lyceum lecture, (concio popularis,) at the Temple of Mercury.  The journals (papyri) of the day ("Tempora Quotidiana,”—­“Tribuinus Quirinalis,”—­“Praeco Romanus,” and the rest) gave abstracts of it, one of which I have translated and modernized, as being a substitute for the analysis I intended to make.

IV.   Kal.   Mart. . . . .

The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well attended by the elite of our great city.  Two hundred thousand sestertia were thought to have been represented in the house.  The doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (illotum vulgus,) who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (gladio jugulati).  The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,—­the subject Old Age.  Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname of chick-pea (Cicero) is said by some to be derived.  As a lecturer is public property, we may remark, that his outer garment (toga) was of cheap stuff and somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance of dress and manner (habitus, vestitusque) were somewhat provincial.