Page:The works of Horace - Christopher Smart.djvu/160

142 Neither your wife, nor your son, desires your recovery; all your neighbors, acquaintances, [nay the very] boys and girls hate you. Do you wonder that no one tenders you the affection which you do not merit, since you prefer your money to everything else? If you think to retain, and preserve as friends, the relations which nature gives you, without taking any pains; wretch that you are, you lose your labor equally, as if any one should train an ass to be obedient to the rein, and run in the Campus [Martius]. Finally, let there be some end to your search; and, as your riches increase, be in less dread of poverty; and begin to cease from your toil, that being acquired which you coveted: nor do as did one Umidius (it is no tedious story), who was so rich that he measured his money, so sordid that he never clothed him self any better than a slave; and, even to his last moments, was in dread lest want of bread should oppress him: but his freed-woman, the bravest of all the daughters of Tyndarus, cut him in two with a hatchet.

“What therefore do you persuade me to? That I should lead the life of Nævius, or in such a manner as a Nomentanus?”

You are going [now] to make things tally, that are contradictory in their natures. When I bid you not be a miser, I do not order you to become a debauchee or a prodigal. There is some difference between the case of Tanais and his son-in-law Visellius, there is a mean in things; finally, there are certain boundaries, on either side of which moral rectitude can not exist. I return now whence I digressed. Does no one, after the miser’s example, like his own station, but rather praise those who have different pursuits; and pines, because his neighbor’s she-goat bears a more distended udder: nor considers himself in relation to the greater multitude of poor; but labors to surpass, first one and then another? Thus the richer man is always an obstacle to one that is hastening [to be rich]: as when the courser whirls along the chariot,