n situation at this moment, which is in
the Acropolis of Athens, best meets my idea of what is prudent under the
circumstances.'

Well it would have been for Cicero's peace of mind if he could seriously
have reconciled himself to abide by that specular station. Had he
pleaded ill-health, he might have done so with decorum. As it was,
thinking his dignity concerned in not absenting himself from the public
councils at a season so critical, after a few weeks' repose he sailed
forward to Italy, which he reached on the 23rd of November. And with
what result? Simply to leave it again with difficulty and by stratagem,
after a winter passed in one continued contest with the follies of his
friends, nothing done to meet his own sense of the energy required,
every advantage forfeited as it arose, ruined in the feeble execution,
individual activity squandered for want of plan, and (as Cicero
discovered in the end) a principle of despair, and _the secret reserve
of a flight operating_ upon the leaders _from the very beginning_. The
key to all this is obvious for those who read with their eyes awake.
Pompey and the other consular leaders were ruined for action by age and
by the derangement of their digestive organs. Eating too much and too
luxuriously is far more destructive to the energies of action than
intemperance as to drink. Women everywhere alike are temperate as to
eating; and the only females memorable for ill-health from luxurious
eating have been Frenchwomen or Belgians--witness the Duchess of
Portsmouth, and many others of the two last centuries whom we could
name. But men everywhere commit excesses in this respect, if they have
it in their power. With the Roman nobles it was almost a necessity to do
so. Could any popular man evade the necessity of keeping a splendid
dinner-table? And is there one man in a thousand who can sit at a festal
board laden with all the delicacies of remotest climates, and continue
to practise an abstinence for which he is not sure of any reward? All
his abstinence may be defeated by a premature fate, and in the meantime
he is told, with some show of reason, that a life defrauded of its
genial enjoyments is _not_ life, is at all events a present loss, whilst
the remuneration is doubtful, except where there happen to be powerful
intellectual activities to reap an _instant_ benefit from such
sacrifices. Certainly it is the last extremity of impertinence to attack
men's habits in this respect. No m