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134 with the hardships of proscription and confiscation; with early orphanage and forfeited lands; with such shrunken rents and decimated acreage, as made a young man all the keener to bring his wits into the market, and perchance to develop talents which would have "died uncommended," had the stimulus of stern necessity not existed. In the same elegy already alluded to, allusion is made to the sweeping encroachments of the ruthless "government measuring-rod," which made him fain, when he assumed the manly toga, and laid aside the golden amulet worn by the children of the freeborn or "ingenui," to relieve his widowed mother of the burden which his father's premature death had devolved on her, and to repair to Rome with a view to completing his training for the bar. That he was obliged to content himself with an ordinary preparation, and to forego the higher Attic polish, is clear from an admission to his friend Tullus that he has yet at a much later period to see Athens; but further, we may guess that his keeping terms at the bar soon became only his ostensible occupation in life, and that like young Horace the treasury clerk, and Virgil the suitor, and Tibullus the claimant, the channel which led to real fame and competence was—poetry.

Of how many modern divines, and essayists, and lit-