35® THOUGHTS UPON HUNTING. 



No fierce unruly senate threatens here. 

 No axe or scaffold to the view appear. 

 No envy, disappointment, and despair. 



} 



And, for the contentment which is supposed to accompany 

 a country life, we have not only the best authority of our 

 own time to support it, but even that of the best poets of 

 the Augustan age. Virgil surely felt what he wrote, when 

 he said, " fortunatos nimium, sua si bona itorint, agricolas /'* 

 and Horace's famous ode, " Beatus ilk qui procid ncgotiis^^ 

 seems not less to come from the heart of a man who is 

 generally allowed to have had a perfedt knowledge of man- 

 kind ; and this, even at the time when he was the favou- 

 rite of the greatest emperor, and in the midst of all the 

 magnificence of the greatest city, in the world. 



The elegant Pliny also, in his Epistle to MInutlus 

 Fundanus, which is admirably translated by the Earl of Or- 

 rery, v\hilst he arraigns the life that he leads at Rome, speaks 

 with a kind of rapture of a country life: — "Welcome," 

 says he, " thou life of integrity and virtue ! — Welcome, 

 " sweet and innocent amusement ! — Thou art almost pre- 

 " ferable to business and employment of every kind !" — 

 And it v/as here, we are told, that the great Bacon expe- 



