The old Roman had not the horror of country society which so many civilised Englishmen either have or affect. "I like a talk", he says, "over a cup of wine". "Even when I am down at my Sabine estate, I daily make one at a party of my country neighbours, and we prolong our conversation very frequently far into the night". The words are put into Cato's mouth, but the voice is the well-known voice of Cicero. We find him here, as in his letters, persuading himself into the belief that the secret of happiness is to be found in the retirement of the country. And his genial and social nature beams through it all. We are reminded of his half-serious complaints to Atticus of his importunate visitors at Formiae, the dinner-parties which he was, as we say now, "obliged to go to", and which he so evidently enjoyed.[1] [Footnote 1: "A clergyman was complaining of the want of society in the country where he lived, and said, 'They talk of _runts_' (i.e., young cows). 'Sir', said Mr. Salusbury, 'Mr. Johnson would learn to talk of runts;' meaning that I was a man who would make the most of my situation, whatever it was".--Boswell's Life. Cicero was like Dr. Johnson.] He is careful, however, to remind his readers that old age, to be really either happy or venerable, must not be the old age of the mere voluptuary or the debauchee; that the grey head, in order to be, even in his pagan sense, "a crown of glory", must have been "found in the way of righteousness". Shakespeare might have learned from Cicero in these points the moral which he puts into the mouth of his Adam-- "Therefore mine age is as a lusty winter, Frosty but kindly". It is a miserable old age, says the Roman, which is obliged to appeal to its grey hairs as its only claim to the respect of its juniors. "Neither hoar hairs nor wrinkles can arrogate reverence as their right. It is the life whose opening years have been honourably spent which reaps the reward of reverence at its close".