LAST WORDS LAST THOUGHTS. 313 



of rapid narrative, and all the rest is self-dissection; it con- 

 tains a chapter on his vices and another on his virtues; one 

 on his honours, one on his disgraces, a long one on his 

 friends, a very short one on his enemies, of whom he will 

 not speak. One chapter compiled by the old man is a long 

 list of the illustrious contemporaries who had named him 

 in their works. The book abounds, of course, in per- 

 sonal information and self-revelation; but his mind was 

 bowed down to the dust when he was writing it. He was 

 the sorrowful old man whose hopes were wrecked, and 

 who was to be met in the streets of Rome walking with 

 the strange, unsteady gait of a lunatic 1 , dressed unlike 

 other people, a man to be wondered at by strangers, and 

 by his own friends apparently considered mad. His book 

 contains everywhere traces of the rack on which his spirit 

 had been tortured. Grief for his dead son is still the 

 ruling thought, and one of his very latest writings is 

 a Naenia 2 a funeral song placed near the end of his last 



1 De Vita Propria, cap. xiv. 



2 Ibid. cap. 1. The lines translated in the text are these: 



" O sanctissima conjunx, 



Felix morte tua, neque in hunc servata dolorem ! 

 Ipse ego, nate, tuurn macula vi crimine nomen: 

 Pulsus ob invidiam patria, laribusque paternis, 

 Debueram patriot pamas, odiisque meorum; 

 Omnes per mortes animam sontein ipse dedissem, 

 Contra ego vivendo vici mea fata, superstes. 

 Sed tamen seternum vivet per seecula nomen, 

 Nate, tuum: notusque Bactris jam notus et Indis: 

 Mortuus es nobis, toto ut sis vivus in orbe." 



