158 AGRICULTURE. 



high farming " nihil minus expedire quam agrum optime 

 colere." He gives an instance of a very rich man who 

 ruined himself by farming for ostentation. He says there 

 is a mean course, and he appears to intimate (though the 

 passage is obscure), that a tenant, working himself and 

 having a family which must be maintained, may do some 

 things with profit which would be ruinous to a proprietor 

 who lived at a distance, and hired the labour which was 

 employed in doing them. He defends the ancients against 

 the charge of having recommended bad farming. He says 

 that by their oracular expression, " bonis malis," they 

 merely meant that you should do things well and cheap ; 

 a point at which we have been aiming all our lives, and 

 have never hit it. 



Having cleared away these preliminary matters, we will 

 now accompany the Koman farmer into his arable lands, 

 and into his meadows and pastures, and will describe the 

 management which he applied to each. We will take the 

 latter and shorter subject first. As to pasturing, the de- 

 tails are few ; but it is a pursuit much commended by the 

 writers, on the characteristic ground that it calls for little 

 outlay. Columella reports Cato to have answered the in- 

 quiry, how a man could get rich quickest by farming? 

 "By being a good grazier." How next? "By being a 

 middling grazier." " I regret," says Columella, " to add, 

 that to the inquiry, repeated a third time, so wise a man 

 should have replied, ' By being a bad grazier ; ' " though, as 

 to his second answer, there can be no doubt that middling 

 grazing is more profitable than the best management in 

 any other line of agriculture. Pliny admits the two first 

 responses to be genuine, but snubs Columella by discre- 

 diting the third. He says that Cato's purpose was to in- 

 culcate that we should depend most on those returns which 

 were got at the least expense.* Meadows are included in 

 the same category of commendation. All the writers 



* Mr. Hoskyns gives a different interpretation to the passage, but has 

 evidently mistaken its meaning. 



