thousand acres of vineyard and tillage and wood. Miss Waddell has
reminded us, on the authority of Saintsbury (whom else?) that 'to this
day it boasts itself as Château-Ausone, one of the two best of the St
Emilion clarets.' Here he tends his roses and sends his boy round to the
neighbours to bid them to luncheon, while he interviews the cook. Six,
including the host, is the right number--if more it is not a meal but a
melée. Then there are all his relatives to be commemorated in verse, his
grandfather and his grandmother and his sisters and his cousins and his
aunts (especially his aunts).

And when the family circle palls there is the senior common room to fall
back upon and the professors of Bordeaux to be celebrated in their turn.
Professors were important people in the empire of the fourth century;
Symmachus says that it is the mark of a flourishing state that good
salaries should be paid to professors; though what exactly we are to
deduce from that in the light of history I should hesitate to say. So
Ausonius writes a collection of poems about the professors of Bordeaux.
There are thirty-two of them and all are celebrated. There is Minervius
the orator, who had a prodigious memory and after a game of backgammon
was wont to conduct a post-mortem over every move. There is Anastasius
the grammarian, who was so foolish as to leave Bordeaux for a provincial
university and thenceforth languished in well-merited obscurity. There
is Attius Tiro Delphidius, who retired from a legal career into the
professorial chair, but could never be got to take any trouble with his
men, to the disappointment of their parents. There is Jocundus the
grammarian, who did not really deserve his title, but was such a kind
man that we will commemorate him among men of worth, although he was,
strictly speaking, unequal to the job. There is Exuperius, who was very
good-looking and whose eloquence sounded superb until you examined it
and found that it meant nothing. There is Dynamius, who slipped from the