this is owing to a fault of which you may cure yourself by one minute's reflection? What shall I say? You are the richest person in the commonwealth; you have no male child; your daughters are all married to wealthy patricians; you are far in the decline of life, and yet you are deeply stained with that odious and ignoble vice of covetousness. It is affirmed, that you descend even to the meanest and most scandalous degrees of it; and while you possess so many millions, while you are daily acquiring so many more, you are solicitous how to save a single sesterce; of which a hundred ignominious instances are produced, and in all men's mouths. I will only mention that passage of the buskins[1], which, after abundance of persuasion, you would hardly suffer to be cut from your legs, when they were so wet and cold, that to have kept them on would have, endangered your life.
"Instead of using the common arguments to dissuade you from this weakness, I will endeavour to convince you, that you are really guilty of it; and leave the cure to your own good sense. For perhaps you are not yet persuaded that this is your crime; you have probably never yet been reproached for it to your face; and what you are now told comes from one unknown, and it may be from an enemy. You will allow yourself indeed to be prudent in the management of your fortune; you are not a prodigal, like Clodius, or Catiline: but surely that deserves not the name of avarice. I will inform you how to be convinced. Disguise your person, go among the common
- ↑ Wet stockings.
