"Do you set any store by good name, which we find Is more welcome than song to the ears of mankind? Magnificent turbot, plate richly embossed, Will bring infinite shame with an infinite cost. Add kinsmen and neighbours all furious, your own Disgust with yourself, when you find yourself groan For death, which has shut itself off from your hope, With not even a sou left to buy you a rope. "'Most excellent doctrine!' you answer, 'and would, For people like Trausius, be all very good; But I have great wealth, and an income that brings In enough to provide for the wants of three kings.' But is this any reason you should not apply Your superfluous wealth to ends nobler, more high? You so rich, why should any good honest man lack? Our temples, why should they be tumbling to wrack? Wretch, of all this great heap have you nothing to spare For our dear native land? Or why should you dare To think that misfortune will never o'ertake you? Oh, then, what a butt would your enemies make you! Who will best meet reverses? The man who, you find, Has by luxuries pampered both body and mind? Or he who, contented with little, and still Looking on to the future, and fearful of ill, Long, long ere a murmur is heard from afar, In peace has laid up the munitions of war?" Alas for the wisdom, of Ofellus the sage! Nineteen centuries have come and gone, and the spectacle is still before us of the same selfishness, extravagance, and folly, which he rebuked so well and so vainly, but pushed to even greater excess, and more widely diffused, enervating the frames and ruining the fortunes of one great section of society, and helping to inspire another section, and that a dangerous one, with angry disgust at the hideous contrast between the opposite extremes of wretchedness and luxury which everywhere meets the eye in the great cities of the civilised world. In the fourth Satire of the Second Book, Horace ridicules, in a vein of exquisite irony, the _gourmets_ of his day, who made a philosophy of flavours, with whom sauces were a science, and who had condensed into aphorisms the merits of the poultry, game, or fish of the different and often distant regions from which they were brought to Rome. Catius has been listening to a dissertation by some Brillât-Savarin of this class, and is hurrying home to commit to his tablets the precepts by which he professes himself to have been immensely struck, when he is met by Horace, and prevailed upon to repeat some of them in the very words of this philosopher of the dinner-table. Exceedingly curious they are, throwing no small light both upon the materials of the Roman cuisine and upon the treatment by the Romans of their wines. Being delivered, moreover, with the epigrammatic precision of philosophical axioms, their effect is infinitely amusing. Thus:-- "Honey Aufidius mixed with strong Falernian; he was very wrong."