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of Sidon* left his pleasing toils, for the purpose of assum- 

 ing the burdensome cares of state. And it was from such 

 a scene that Horace might well have refused to part, to 

 enjoy the more intimate companionship of the master of 

 the world ; especially as it must have been alloyed with 

 the society of that proud but degenerate capital, to which 

 Jugurtha, not long before, had bidden farewell in lan- 

 guage less flattering than severe : " Farewell, O cruel 

 and venal city, which requirest only a purchaser in order 

 to sell thyself and all which thou dost contain." And it 

 was in the shades of those Salonian gardens, which his 

 own hands had made, that Dioclesian, the emperor, re- 

 ceived the ambassadors, who vainly strove to reinvest his 

 brows with 



the hollow crown 

 That rounds the mortal temples of a king. 



But perhaps one of the finest natural illustrations of the 

 interest which still clings to pursuits like these, long after 

 the heart is comparatively dead to all other human cares, 

 is to be found in the pages of the great novelist, whose 

 pictures appear to us less like efforts of imagination, than 

 delineations of nature herself in her invariable aspects. 

 The venerable Abbot of St. Mary's, according to the tenor 

 of the tale, formed apparently for times less troublous 

 than those which then distracted his unhappy country, 

 resigns to a bolder spirit his conspicuous post in the van 

 of the armies of the church, now become literally and 

 carnally militant. He betakes himself, with cheerful res- 

 ignation, to the horticultural occupations of his earlier 

 and happier days. But his present pursuits and his former 

 condition and character necessarily involve him in the 

 plots and counterplots formed for the liberation of that 



* Abdolonymus. 



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