enturies before Christ, and northward of Monte
Gennaro, who never heard of "Hovey's Root-Cutter," or of the law of
primaries, laying down rules[D] of culture so clear, so apt, so full,
that I, who have the advantages of two thousand years, find nothing in
them to laugh at, unless it be a few oblations to the gods;[E] and this,
considering that I am just now burning a little incense (Havana) to the
nymph Volutia, is uncalled for.

[Footnote D: This mention, of course, excludes the Senator's _formulae_
for unguents, aperients, cattle-nostrums, and pickled pork.]

[Footnote E: CXXXIV. Cato, _De Re Rustica_.]

And if Senator Cato were to wake up to-morrow, in the white house that
stares through the rain yonder, and were to open his little musty vellum
of slipshod maxims, and, in faith of it, start a rival farm in the bean
line, or in vine-growing,--keeping clear of the newspapers,--I make no
doubt but he would prove as thrifty a neighbor as my good friend the
Deacon.

We nineteenth-century men, at work among our cabbages, clipping off the
purslane and the twitch-grass, are disposed to assume a very complacent
attitude, as we lean upon our hoe-handles,--as if we were doing tall
things in the way of illustrating physiology and the cognate sciences.
But the truth is, old Laertes, near three thousand years ago, in his
slouch cap and greasy beard, was hoeing up in the same way his purslane
and twitch-grass, in his bean-patch on the hills of Ithaca. The
difference between us, so far as the crop and the tools go, is, after
all, ignominiously small. _He_ dreaded the weevil in his beans, and _we_
the club-foot in our cabbages; _we_ have the "Herald," and _he_ had
none; _we_ have "Plantation-Bitters," and _he_ had his jug of the
Biblian wine.

M. Varro, another Roman farmer, lies between the same covers "De Re
Rustica" with Cato, and seems to have had more literary tact, though
less of blunt sagacity. Yet he challenges at once our confidence by
telling us so frankly the occasion of his writing upon such a subject.
Life, he says, is a bubble,--and the life of an old man a bubble about
to break. He is eighty, and must pack his luggage to go out of this
world. ("_Annus octogesimus admonet me, ut sarcinas colligam antequam
proficiscar e vita_.") Therefore he, writes down for his wife, Fundania,
the rules by which she may manage the farm.

And a very respectably old lady she must have been, to deal with the
_villici_ and the _colon