some protest when the very heights of Parnassus are
invaded by a spirit which surely is not science, but her unmeaning
shadow; a spirit which would degrade every masterpiece of human genius
into the mere pabulum of hungry professors, and which values a poet's
text only as a field for the rivalries of sterile pedantry and
arbitrary conjecture."]

[Footnote 9: It was perhaps this encomium upon the farmer at the
expense of the banker which inspired Horace's friend Alfius to
withdraw his capital from his banking business and dream a delicious
idyl of a simple carefree country life: but, it will be recalled
(Epode II, the famous "Beatus ille qui procul negotiis") that Alfius,
like many a modern amateur farmer, recruited from town, soon repented
that he had ever listened to the alluring call of "back to the land"
and after a few weeks of disillusion in the country, returned to town
and sought to get his money out again at usury.

Columella (I, praef.) is not content with Cato's contrast of the
virtue of the farmer with the iniquity of the banker, but he brings
in the lawyer's profession for animadversion also. This, he says, the
ancient Romans used to term a canine profession, because it consisted
in barking at the rich.]

[Footnote 10: The Roman numerals at the beginning of the paragraphs
indicate the chapters of Cato from which they are translated. If
Cato had not pretended to despise every thing which smacked of Greek
literary art he might have edited and arranged his material, in which
event his book would have been easier to read than it is, and no less
valuable. Modern scholarship would not now venture to perform such an
office for such a result, because it involves tampering with a text
(as who should say, shooting a fox!) and yet modern scholarship
wonders at the decay of classical studies in an impatient age. At the
risk of anathema the present version has attempted to group Cato's
material, and in so doing has omitted most of those portions which are
now of merely curious interest.]

[Footnote 11: This, of course, means buying at a high price, except
in extraordinary cases. There is another system of agriculture which
admits of the pride of making two blades of grass grow where none was
before, and the profit which comes of buying cheap and selling dear.
This is farming for improvement, an art which was well described two
hundred years before Cato. Xenophon (_Economicus_ XX, 22) says:

"For those who are able