And often ere our friend is out of sight,
We start: the thing can scarce be credited—
We have been silent, or our words been trite,
And here's the dearest thing of all unsaid!
CHARLOTTE F. BATES.
LAURENTINUM.
If anybody ever could have enjoyed living in heathen times, it must have been Pliny the Younger. A friend of ours calls him the gentlemanly letter writer, and so he was. He wrote letters which must have been treats to his correspondents. It is well that some of his notes did not require answers, for, as the letters of "the parties of the second part" are irretrievably lost, the annoyance one feels over a one-sided record is somewhat abated. Only the imperial replies are preserved. But, as we have said, Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (nephew to the ponderously fat and still more ponderously learned C. Plinius Secundus, who, like Leibnitz in latter times, sat, wrote, was read to, slept, and ate in his arm-chair for days together) must have enjoyed living. If he had not had so gentle a disposition and so loving a recollection of his uncle, we might have fancied him terribly bored by that worthy; for the elder Pliny was a heluo miraculorum, believing in and jotting down everything he heard, saw or read, like the immortal Mr. Pickwick. A book or a reader was ever at his elbow—a tablet or parchment ever within reach. And all this was undertaken or done for his nephew's advantage. There could have been but little pleasure in having such a guardian, though the nephew's easy, loving temper and delicate constitution caused him to be petted a good deal. A lucky dyspepsia (the Romans must have had the dyspepsia from eating the messes their Greek cooks put upon their tables) spared him from continuous attendance upon his uncle's studies. Then, too, Pliny was under his uncle's charge only for a few years, for Pliny the Elder lost his life in the famous eruption of Vesuvius. He was lord high admiral of the Mediterranean west of Italy; and of course when the eruption was reported at Misenum, at the admiralty-house, he must needs view it. It was too remarkable a thing not to have a high place in his Natural History. He ordered out his light galley. The rest we all know—how the admiral was as brave as he was fat, and seeing the danger in which so many friends with whom he had often supped were put, attempted to help some of them. So, because of the widow Rectina and his good friend Pomponianus, he came to his sad death.
It was not so very great a loss to his nephew, now turned of eighteen—a likely youth, of course well connected, and now his uncle's heir. Caius Pliny went through the steps of the civil service with credit to himself, though his advancement was checked during Domitian's reign. He was indeed a consul, but then many consuls were appointed during the year. But it was much more prudent for him to keep quiet. He had a good practice—for this, though not strictly accurate, is the nearest term by which to designate his legal employment—and, to take a leap beyond the time we are speaking of, he was about twenty-five years afterward governor of Bithynia, whence he wrote his famous letter to the emperor Trajan about the Christians in his province. Of this letter much has been said, but we think that Pliny has not always been rightly judged about it. He was too conservative a man to be a persecutor, but was not much above or beyond his own time. And he wrote of the Christians as being a religio illicita—an illegal assembly of heretics—as regarded the state religion, which it was his duty to defend. It was wrong to persecute the Christians—wrong on general principles, wrong on particular axioms. But, alas! it has taken nearly seventeen more centuries of fiercer persecutors than Pliny proved to be to learn this little fact. All this is, as he would have said, obiter—by the way. It has, however, a good deal to do indirectly with his good living; for, as we were saying, C.P.C. Secundus lived very well indeed—not extravagantly, but comfortably.
Now, to live well or comfortably, it is needful to have something wherewith to live thus comfortably. The start which C.P. Secundus gave C.P.C. Secundus lifted him up into a successful lawyer, a sort of public orator. As heir to his uncle's estate, and as coheir to estates of deceased friends, and as a public man, he amassed considerable property. He could undoubtedly—and we undoubtingly believe he did—do this with scrupulous honesty. His fees, salaries and legacies he took pains to earn. Legacies he claimed as they were left him, though he stooped to no fawning to obtain them, and in at least one instance returned the property to the natural (though he says undeserving) heir. If so, let us give him due credit for generosity. Certainly, he was not selfish or illiberal. He assisted his friends with money and influence, as well as advice, and he gave to his native town, Comum, a public library, besides an endowment of three hundred thousand sesterces ($12,000) yearly for ever to maintain children born of free parents. How long this endowment lasted we cannot say, but it must, at any rate, have disappeared in the dilapidations caused three hundred and fifty years afterward by the Gothic invaders of Italy. Then he had two villas at least, besides his town-house, with slaves, attendants and following to match. This will suffice to show that he had the wherewithal. But could he enjoy it? He was a literary man: his uncle had settled that for him. He was an oratorical light in the Senate. His letters show that he was a gentleman, whose delicacy of feeling was as fine as the lauded courtesies of modern times. As proof that he was a gentleman, and that he knew how to distinguish a good from a poor dinner, and as proof, too, of the good advice he was wont to give away as freely as good money, we will put in his letter to Avitus upon occasion of a dinner he had just attended: