If Pliny regarded the seat at Ostium as only a convenient and inexpensive place, we may form some notion of his Tuscan property, which, as he says in his letter to his friend Apollinaris, (Lib. V. Epist. 6,) he prefers to all his others, whether of Tivoli, Tusculum, or Palestrina. There, at a distance of a hundred and fifty miles from Rome, in the midst of the richest corn-bearing and olive-bearing regions of Tuscany, he can enjoy country quietude. There is no need to be slipping on his toga; ceremony is left behind. The air is healthful; the scene is quiet. "_Studiis animum, venatu corpus exerceo._" I will not follow him through the particularity of the description which he gives to his friend Apollinaris. There are the wide-reaching views of fruitful valleys and of empurpled hill-sides; there are the fresh winds sweeping from the distant Apennines; there is the _gestatio_ with its clipped boxes, the embowered walks, the colonnades, the marble banquet-rooms, the baths, the Carystian columns, the soft, embracing air, and the violet sky. I leave Pliny seated upon a bench in a marble alcove of his Tuscan garden. From this bench, the water, gushing through several little pipes, as if it were pressed out by the weight of the persons reposing upon it, falls into a stone cistern underneath, whence it is received into a polished marble basin, so artfully contrived that it is always full, without ever overflowing. "When I sup here," he writes, "this basin serves for a table,--the larger dishes being placed round the margin, while the smaller ones swim about in the form of little vessels and waterfowl." Such _al fresco_ suppers the country-gentlemen of Italy ate in the first century of our era! * * * * * Palladius wrote somewhere about the middle of the fourth century. His work is arranged in the form of a calendar for the months, and closes with a poem which is as inferior to the poems of the time of Augustus as the later emperors were inferior to the Cæsars. There is in his treatise no notable advance upon the teachings of Columella, whom he frequently quotes,--as well as certain Greek authorities of the Lower Empire. I find in his treatise a somewhat fuller list of vegetables, fruits, and field-crops than belongs to the earlier writers. I find more variety of treatment. I see a waning faith in the superstitions of the past; Bacchus and the Lares are less jubilant than they were; but the Christian civilization has not yet vivified the art of culture. The magnificent gardens of Nero and the horticultural experiences of the great Adrian at Tivoli have left no traces in the method or inspiration of Palladius. * * * * *