under his special protection; "why, don't you see that the man is
described as a philosopher?--and I should like to know when a philosopher
ever plunged into matrimony without considerable misgivings and cold
shivers! Indeed, it seems that--perhaps before he was a philosopher--
Riccabocca had tried the experiment, and knew what it was. Why, even
that plain-speaking, sensible, practical man, Metellus Numidicus, who was
not even a philosopher, but only a Roman censor, thus expressed himself
in an exhortation to the people to perpetrate matrimony: 'If, O Quirites,
we could do without wives, we should all dispense with that subject of
care /ea molestia careremus/; but since nature has so managed it that we
cannot live with women comfortably, nor without them at all, let us
rather provide for the human race than our own temporary felicity.'"

Here the ladies set up such a cry of indignation, that both Roland and
myself endeavoured to appease their wrath by hasty assurances that we
utterly repudiated the damnable doctrine of Metellus Numidicus.

My father, wholly unmoved, as soon as a sullen silence was established,
recommenced. "Do not think, ladies," said he, "that you were without
advocates at that day: there were many Romans gallant enough to blame the
censor for a mode of expressing himself which they held to be equally
impolite and injudicious. 'Surely,' said they, with some plausibility,
if Numidicus wished men to marry, he need not have referred so
peremptorily to the disquietudes of the connection, and thus have made
them more inclined to turn away from matrimony than give them a relish
for it.' But against these critics one honest man (whose name of Titus
Castricius should not be forgotten by posterity) maintained that Metellus
Numidicus could not have spoken more properly; 'For remark,' said he,
'that Metellus was a censor, not a rhetorician. It becomes rhetoricians
to adorn and disguise and make the best of things; but Metellus, /sanctus