terest and sympathy which he
fails sometimes to command in his career as a statesman. At forty-five
years of age he has become a very wealthy man--has bought for something
like L30,000 a noble mansion on the Palatine Hill; and besides the
old-fashioned family seat near Arpinum--now become his own by his father's
death--he has built, or enlarged, or bought as they stood, villas at
Antium, at Formiae, at Pompeii, at Cumae, at Puteoli, and at half-a-dozen
other places, besides the one favourite spot of all, which was to him
almost what Abbotsford was to Scott, the home which it was the delight
of his life to embellish--his country-house among the pleasant hills of
Tusculum.[1] It had once belonged to Sulla, and was about twelve miles
from Rome. In that beloved building and its arrangements he indulged, as
an ample purse allowed him, not only a highly-cultivated taste, but in
some respects almost a whimsical fancy. "A mere cottage", he himself terms
it in one place; but this was when he was deprecating accusations of
extravagance which were brought against him, and we all understand
something of the pride which in such matters "apes humility". He would
have it on the plan of the Academia at Athens, with its _palaestra_
and open colonnade, where, as he tells us, he could walk and discuss
politics or philosophy with his friends. Greek taste and design were as
fashionable among the Romans of that day as the Louis Quatorze style was
with our grandfathers. But its grand feature was a library, and its most
valued furniture was books. Without books, he said, a house was but a body
without a soul. He entertained for these treasures not only the calm love
of a reader, but the passion of a bibliophile; he was particular about his
bindings, and admired the gay colours of the covers in which the precious
manuscripts were kept as well as the more intellectual beauties within. He
had clever Greek slaves employed from time to time in making copies of all
such works as were not to be readily purchased. He could walk across, too,
as he tells us, to his neighbour's, the young Lucullus, a kind of ward
of his, and borrow from the library of that splendid mansion any book he
wanted. His friend Atticus collected for him everywhere--manuscripts,
paintings, statuary; though for sculpture he professes not to care much,
except for such subjects as might form appropriate decorations for his
_palaestra_ and his library. Very pleasant must have been the d