em with so much
patience; and am not willing to believe that a less understanding can do
more than a greater, or that the effects of precept cannot arrive to as
great a height as those of custom. And knowing of how uncertain duration
these accidental conveniences are, I never forget, in the height of all
my enjoyments, to make it my chiefest prayer to Almighty God, that He
will please to render me content with myself and the condition wherein I
am. I see young men very gay and frolic, who nevertheless keep a mass of
pills in their trunk at home, to take when they've got a cold, which they
fear so much the less, because they think they have remedy at hand.
Every one should do in like manner, and, moreover, if they find
themselves subject to some more violent disease, should furnish
themselves with such medicines as may numb and stupefy the part.

The employment a man should choose for such a life ought neither to be a
laborious nor an unpleasing one; otherwise 'tis to no purpose at all to
be retired. And this depends upon every one's liking and humour. Mine
has no manner of complacency for husbandry, and such as love it ought to
apply themselves to it with moderation:

["Endeavour to make circumstances subject to me,
and not me subject to circumstances."
--Horace, Ep., i. i, 19.]

Husbandry is otherwise a very servile employment, as Sallust calls it;
though some parts of it are more excusable than the rest, as the care of
gardens, which Xenophon attributes to Cyrus; and a mean may be found out
betwixt the sordid and low application, so full of perpetual solicitude,
which is seen in men who make it their entire business and study, and the
stupid and extreme negligence, letting all things go at random which we
see in others

"Democriti pecus edit agellos
Cultaque, dum peregre est animus sine corpore velox."

["Democritus' cattle eat his corn and spoil his fields, whilst his
soaring mind ranges abroad without the body."
--Horace, Ep., i, 12, 12.]

But let us hear what advice the younger Pliny gives his friend Caninius
Rufus upon the subject of solitude: "I advise thee, in the full and
plentiful retirement wherein thou art, to leave to thy hinds the care of
thy husbandry, and to addict thyself to the study of letters, to extract
from thence something that may be entirely and absolutely thine own." By
which he means reputation; like Cicero,