Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/461

 Men are of a thousand kinds, and diverse are the colours of their lives. Each has his own desires; no two men offer the same prayers. One under an Eastern sun barters Italian wares for shrivelled pepper, or for the blanching cumin-seed; another grows fat with good cheer and balmy slumbers. A third is all for field games; a fourth loses his all over the dice box; a fifth ruins himself by love; but when once the knotty gout has broken up their joints till they are like the boughs of an old beech tree, they lament that their days have been passed in grossness, that their light has been that of a mist, and bemoan too late the life which they have left behind them.

But your delight has been to grow pale over nightly study, to till the minds of the young, and to sow the seed of Cleanthes in their well-cleansed ears. Seek thence all of you, young men and old alike, a sure aim for your desires, and provisions for the sorrows of old age! "So I will, to-morrow," you say; but to-morrow you will say the same as to-day. "What?" you ask, "do you think it a great thing to present me with a single day?"—No, but when to-morrow comes, yesterday's morrow will have been already spent; and lo! a fresh morrow will be for ever making away with our years, each just beyond our grasp. For though the tire is close to you, and revolves under the self-same pole, you 375