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.
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