s at the grocer's. I used to take my frugal
repast on my writing-table, in the midst of my open books or
interrupted pages. The child had a black dog, which had been forgotten
at the house by some visitor; this dog had ended like the child by
attaching itself to me, and they could not be made to go down the
little wooden stairs when once they had ascended them. During the
greater part of the day, they lay and played together on the mat at my
feet beneath my table. At a later period I took away the dog with me
from Paris, and kept it many years, as a loving and faithful memento of
those days of solitude. I lost him in 1820, not without tears, in
traversing the forests of the Pontine Marshes between Rome and
Terracina. The poor child is become a man, and has learned the art of
engraving, which he practices ably at Lyons. My name having resounded
since, even in his shop, he came to see me, and wept with joy at
beholding me, and with grief at hearing of the loss of the dog. Poor
heart of man! that ever requires what it has once loved, and that sheds
tears of the same water, for the loss of an empire, or for the loss of
an animal.

LXIV.

During the thousands of hours in which I was thus confined between the
stove, the screen, the window, the child, and the dog, I read over all
that antiquity has written and bequeathed to us, except the poets, with
whom we had been surfeited at school, and in whose verses our wearied
eyes saw but the caaesura, and the long or short syllables. Sad effect
of premature satiety, which withers in the mind of a child the most
brightly tinted and perfumed flowers of human thought. But I read over
every philosopher, orator, and historian, in his own language. I loved
especially those who united the three great faculties of
intelligence,--narration, eloquence, and reflection; the fact, the
discourse, and the moral. Thucydides and Tacitus above all others; then
Machiavelli, the sublime practitioner of the diseases of empires; then
Cicero, the sonorous vessel which contains all, from the individual
tears of the man, the husband, the father, and the friend, up to the
catastrophes of Rome and of the world, even to his gloomy forebodings
of his own fate. There is in Cicero a stratum of divine philosophy and
serenity, through which all waters seem to be filtrated and clarified,
and through which his great mind flows in torrents of eloquence,
wisdom, piety, and harmony. I had, till then, thought h