Page:Essays - Abraham Cowley (1886).djvu/67

 most men the capacity or appetite, and fortune allows but to a very few the opportunities or possibility, of applying themselves wholly to philosophy, the best mixture of human affairs that we can make are the employments of a country life. It is, as Columella calls it, Res sine dubitatione proxima et quasi consanguinea sapientiæ, the nearest neighbour, or rather next in kindred to Philosophy. Varro says the principles of it are the same which Ennius made to be the principles of all nature; earth, water, air, and the sun. It does certainly comprehend more parts of philosophy than any one profession, art, or science in the world besides; and therefore Cicero says, the pleasures of a husbandman, Mihi ad sapientis vitam proxime videntur accedere, come very nigh to those of a philosopher. There is no other sort of life that affords so many branches of praise to a panegyrist: The utility of it to a man's self; the usefulness, or, rather necessity of it to all the rest of mankind; the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the dignity. The utility (I mean plainly C—28