glorious, will become the most opprobrious upon earth. _Caesar._ The time, I hope, may be distant; for next to my own name I hold my country's. _Lucullus._ Mine, not coming from Troy or Ida, is lower in my estimation: I place my country's first. You are surveying the little lake beside us. It contains no fish, birds never alight on it, the water is extremely pure and cold; the walk round is pleasant, not only because there is always a gentle breeze from it, but because the turf is fine and the surface of the mountain on this summit is perfectly on a level to a great extent in length--not a trifling advantage to me, who walk often and am weak. I have no alley, no garden, no enclosure; the park is in the vale below, where a brook supplies the ponds, and where my servants are lodged; for here I have only twelve in attendance. _Caesar._ What is that so white, towards the Adriatic? _Lucullus._ The Adriatic itself. Turn round and you may descry the Tuscan Sea. Our situation is reported to be among the highest of the Apennines. Marcipor has made the sign to me that dinner is ready. Pass this way. _Caesar._ What a library is here! Ah, Marcus Tullius! I salute thy image. Why frownest thou upon me--collecting the consular robe and uplifting the right arm, as when Rome stood firm again, and Catiline fled before thee? _Lucullus._ Just so; such was the action the statuary chose, as adding a new endearment to the memory of my absent friend. _Caesar._ Sylla, who honoured you above all men, is not here. _Lucullus._ I have his _Commentaries_: he inscribed them, as you know, to me. Something even of our benefactors may be forgotten, and gratitude be unreproved. _Caesar._ The impression on that couch, and the two fresh honeysuckles in the leaves of those two books, would show, even to a stranger, that this room is peculiarly the master's. Are they sacred? _Lucullus._ To me and Caesar. _Caesar._ I would have asked permission---- _Lucullus._ Caius Julius, you have nothing to ask of Polybius and Thucydides; nor of Xenophon, the next to them on the table. _Caesar._ Thucydides! the most generous, the most unprejudiced, the most sagacious, of historians. Now, Lucullus, you whose judgment in style is more accurate than any other Roman's, do tell me whether a commander, desirous of writing his _Commentaries_, could take to himself a more perfect model than Thucydides? _Lucullus._ Nothing is more perfect, nor ever will be: the scholar of Pericles, the master of Demosthenes, the equal of the one in military science, and of the other not the inferior in civil and forensic; the calm dispassionate judge of the general by whom he was defeated, his defender, his encomiast. To talk of such men is conducive not only to virtue but to health. * * * * * This other is my dining-room. You expect the dishes. _Caesar._ I misunderstood--I fancied----