144 A DISSOLUTE PRIG. 



tarch, " I should never have the heart to sell an ox 

 that had grown old in my service, still less my aged 

 slave." 



Cato's old-fashioned virtue paid very well. He 

 gratified his personal antipathies, and obtained the 

 character of the people's friend. He was always im- 

 peaching the great men of his country, and was him- 

 self impeached nearly fifty times. The man who sets 

 up as being much better than his age is always to be 

 suspected ; and Cato is perhaps the best specimen of 

 the rugged hypocrite and austere charlatan that history 

 can produce. This censor of morals bred slaves for 

 sale.* He made laws against usury, and then turned 

 usurer himself. He was always preaching about the 

 vanity of riches, and wrote an excellent work on the 

 best way of getting rich. He degraded a Roman 

 knight for kissing his wife in the day-time in the pre- 

 sence of his daughter, and he himself, while he was 

 living under his daughter-in-law's roof, bestowed his 

 favours on one of the servant girls of the establish- 

 ment, and allowed her to be impudent to her young 

 mistress. " Old age," he once said to a grey-headed 

 debauchee, " has deformities enough of its own. Do 

 not add to it the deformity of vice." At the time of 

 the amorous affair above mentioned Cato was -nearly 

 eighty years of age. 



On the other hand, he was a most faithful servant 

 to his country ; be was a truly religious man, and his 

 god was the Commonwealth of Rome. Nor was he 

 destitute of the domestic virtues, though sadly defi- 

 cient in that respect. He used to say that those who 

 beat their wives and children laid their sacrilegious 

 hands on the holiest things in the world. He edu- 

 cated his son himself, taught him to box, to ride, to 



