Whatever time is assigned to each to live, with that he ought to be content: for neither need the drama be performed entire by the actor, in order to give satisfaction, provided he be approved in whatever act he may be; nor need the wise man live till the _plaudite_.[45] The short period of life is long enough for living well and honorably; and if you should advance farther, you need no more grieve than farmers do, when the loveliness of spring-time hath passed, that summer and autumn have come. For spring represents the time of youth, and gives promise of the future fruits; the remaining seasons are intended for plucking and gathering those fruits. Now the harvest of old age, as I have often said, is the recollection and abundance of blessings previously secured. In truth, everything that happens agreeably to nature is to be reckoned among blessings. What, however, is so agreeable to nature as for an old man to die? which even is the lot of the young, though nature opposes and resists. And thus it is that young men seem to me to die, just as when the violence of flame is extinguished by a flood of water; whereas old men die, as the exhausted fire goes out, spontaneously, without the exertion of any force. And as fruits when they are green are plucked by force from the trees, but when ripe and mellow drop off, so violence takes away their lives from youths, maturity from old men; a state which to me indeed is so delightful that, the nearer I approach to death, I seem as it were to be getting sight of land, and at length, after a long voyage, to be just coming into harbor.”—EDMONDS. Cicero also wrote a treatise “On Glory,” now lost. It was once in the possession of Petrarch, who commends it in the most flattering terms. The Italian poet was induced to lend it to his aged preceptor; but the latter, driven by poverty, secretly put the work in pawn and died without making known its whereabouts. It never saw the light afterward; although it is supposed to have been destroyed two centuries later by a plagiarist, who had helped himself to some of its fine periods. As a letter-writer, Cicero excels all others. It was the custom of his countrymen to bestow as great pains on private correspondence as on works intended for publication; and his epistles, eight hundred of which survive, are simple, elegant, and glow with wit, though some of them were written so fast as to be almost illegible. (_Consult Jeans’s “Life and Letters of Cicero; Church’s “Roman Life in the Days of Cicero.”_) Our author also turned his hand to history and poetry, but with indifferent success. His works were extremely popular among his contemporaries, some of them selling by the thousand.