ould 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, who says that he would employ his
solitude and retirement from public affairs to acquire by his writings an
immortal life.

"Usque adeone
Scire tuum, nihil est, nisi to scire hoc, sciat alter?"

["Is all that thy learning nothing, unless another knows
that thou knowest?"--Persius, Sat., i. 23.]

It appears to be reason, when a man talks of retiring from the world,
that he should look quite out of [for] himself. These do it but by
halves: they design well enough for themselves when they shall be no more
in it; but still they pretend to extract the fruits of that design from
the world, when absent from it, by a ridiculous contradiction.

The imagination of those who seek solitude upon the account of devotion,
filling their hopes and courage with certainty of divine promises in the
other life, is much more ra