"Lame in feet, and lame in fingers, Crooked in back, with every tooth Rattling in my head, yet, 'sooth, I'm content, so life but lingers. Gnaw my withers, rack my bones, Life, mere life, for all atones."
In one view these lines may certainly be construed to import the same sentiment as the speech of the miserable Claudio in "Measure for Measure,"--
"The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death."
But, on the other hand, they may quite as fairly be regarded as merely giving expression to the tenet of the Epicurean philosophy, that however much we may suffer from physical pain or inconvenience, it is still possible to be happy. "We know what we are; we know not what we may be!"
Not the least misfortune of Maecenas was his marriage to a woman whom he could neither live with nor without--separating from and returning to her so often, that, according to Seneca, he was a thousand times married, yet never had but one wife. Friends he had many, loyal and devoted friends, on whose society and sympathy he leant more and more as the years wore on. He rarely stirred from Rome, loving its smoke, its thronged and noisy streets, its whirl of human passions, as Johnson loved Fleet Street, or "the sweet shady side of Pall Mall," better than all the verdure of Tivoli, or the soft airs and exquisite scenery of Baiae. He liked to read of these things, however; and may have found as keen a pleasure in the scenery of the 'Georgics,' or in Horace's little landscape-pictures, as most men could have extracted from the scenes which they describe.
Such was the man, ushered into whose presence, Horace, the reckless lampooner and satirist, found himself embarrassed, and at a loss for words. Horace was not of the MacSycophant class, who cannot "keep their back straight in the presence of a great man;" nor do we think he had much of the nervous apprehensiveness of the poetic temperament. Why, then, should he have felt thus abashed? Partly, it may have been, from natural diffidence at encountering a man to gain whose goodwill was a matter of no small importance, but whose goodwill, he also knew by report, was not easily won; and partly, to find himself face to face with one so conspicuously identified with the cause against which he had fought, and the men whom he had hitherto had every reason to detest.