But deprived of his wealth (which Augustus afterwards restored), deprived of his friends, and above all, deprived of his library, he must have felt a deep shadow cast over his declining years. Nevertheless, he remained cheerful, and to all appearance contented, and charmed those who knew him by the vigour of his conversation and his varied antiquarian lore. He is never mentioned by any of the Augustan writers. Varro belongs to the genuine type of old Roman, improved but not altered by Greek learning, with his heart fixed in the past, deeply conservative of everything national, and even in his style of speech protesting against the innovations of the day. If we reflect that when Varro wrote his treatise on husbandry, Virgil was at work on the _Georgics_, and then compare the diction of the two, it seems almost incredible that they should have been contemporaries. In all literature there is probably no such instance of rock-like impenetrability to fashion; for him Alexandria might never have existed. He recalls the age of Cato rather than that of Cicero. His versatility was as great as his industry. There was scarcely any department of prose or poetry, provided it was national, in which he did not excel. His early life well fitted him for severe application. Born at Reate, in the Sabine territory, which was the nurse of all manly virtues, [3] Varro, as he himself tells us, had to rough it as a boy; he went barefoot over the mountain side, rode without saddle or bridle, and wore but a single tunic. [4] Bold, frank, and sarcastic, he had all the qualities of the old-fashioned country gentleman. At Rome he became intimate with Aelius Stilo, whose opinion of his pupil is shown by the inscription of his grammatical treatise to him. Stilo's mantle descended on Varro, but with sevenfold virtue. Not only grammar, by which term we must understand philology and etymology as well as syntax, but antiquities secular and religious, and almost all the liberal arts, were passed under review by his encyclopaedic mind.