Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Excerpt from Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners
Cicero's love of the country needs no proof. With his busy life we still associate his quiet Tusculum. Pliny the Younger gives us a description, chie y known to architectural critics, whom it has sadly puzzled, of a rich public man's retreat from the smoke of Rome, only seventeen miles from the city, so that (writes Pliny to his friend), after we have finished the business of the day, we can go thither from town at sunset 3 a journey which he calls extremely short when performed on horseback (more tedious in a carriage, because the roads were sandy). Certainly a man must have loved the country well to ride seventeen miles to a house in it after the business of the day. Few English statesmen or lawyers, I suspect, would be equally alert in their sacrifice to the rural deities. But how lovingly Pliny describes the house, with apartments so built as to command the finest prospects: the terrace before the gal lery all perfumed with violets; the gallery itself so placed that the shadow of the building is thrown on the terrace in the forenoon; and at the end of the gallery the little garden apartment, which he calls his own - his sweetheart - looking on one side to the terrace, on the other to the sea; and then his own bedchamber carefully constructed for the exclusion of noise. No voice of babbling servants, no murmurs from boom ing seas, reach the room in which, as he tells us elsewhere, he not only sleeps, but muses.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."