" This could not but be understood by his
disciples as an inviolable injunction to live in a garret, which I have
found frequently visited by the echo and the wind. Nor was the tradition
wholly obliterated in the age of Augustus, for Tibullus evidently
congratulates himself upon his garret, not without some allusion to the
Pythagorean precept:
_Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem--
Aut, gelidas hibernus aquas quum fuderit Auster,
Securum somnos imbre juvante sequi_! Lib. i. El. i. 45.
How sweet in sleep to pass the careless hours,
Lull'd by the beating winds and dashing show'rs!
And it is impossible not to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an
earlier writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of
serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down
upon the confused and erratick state of the world moving below him:
_Sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere
Edita doctrina Sapientum templa serena;
Despicere unde queas alios, passimque videre
Errare, atque viam palanteis quaerere vitae_. Lib. ii. 7.
--'Tis sweet thy lab'ring steps to guide
To virtue's heights, with wisdom well supplied,
And all the magazines of learning fortified:
From thence to look below on human kind,
Bewilder'd in the maze of life, and blind.
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