While, like many of the later poets, they came originally as strangers to Rome, unlike them, they seem to have in later years, resided habitually within the city. The taste for country life prevailing in the days of Cicero and of Horace was not developed to any great extent in the times of Ennius or Lucilius. The great Scipio, indeed, retired to spend the last years of his life at Liternum; and Cicero mentions the boyish delight of Laelius and the younger Africanus in escaping from the public business and the crowded streets of Rome to the pleasant sea-shore of Caieta[332]. Accius seems to have possessed a country farm, and Lucilius showed something of a wandering disposition, and possessed the means to gratify it. But most of these writers were men of moderate means; nor had it then become the practice of the patrons of literature to bestow farms or country-houses on their friends. By their circumstances, as well as the general taste of their time, they were thus brought almost exclusively into contact with the life and business of the city; and their works were consequently more distinguished by their strong sense and understanding than by the passionate or contemplative susceptibility which characterises the great eras of Latin literature. It is remarkable that nearly all the early poets lived to a great age, and maintained their intellectual vigour unabated to their latest years; while of their successors none reached the natural term of human life, and some among them, like many great modern poets, were cut off prematurely before their promise was fulfilled. The finer sensibility and more passionate agitation of the poetic temperament appear, in some cases, to exhaust prematurely the springs of life; while, in natures more happily balanced, or formed by more favourable circumstances, the gifts of genius are accompanied by stronger powers of life, and thus maintain the freshness of youth unimpaired till the last. The length of time during which Naevius, Plautus, Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, and probably Lucilius, exercised their art suggests the inference, either that they were men of firmer fibre than their successors, or that they were braced to a more enduring strength by the action of their age. As the work of men writing in the fulness of their years, the serious poetry of the time appealed to the mature sympathies of manhood; and even the comic poetry of Plautus deals with the follies of youth in a genial spirit of indulgence, tempered by the sense of their absurdity, such as might naturally be entertained by one who had outlived them.