calculations and they base fallacious systems on no better footing.
The question next agitated was whether the citizens of Rome, in the time of the Cæsars, were richer than the citizens of Paris in the time of Monsieur Silhouette?
"Oh," says Mr. Andrew, "this is a point on which I have some call to speak. I was a long time the Man of Forty Crowns, but I conceive that the citizens of Rome had more. Those illustrious robbers on the highway pillaged the finest countries of Asia, of Africa, and of Europe. They lived splendidly on the produce of their rapines; but yet there were doubtless some beggars at Rome. I am persuaded that among those conquerors of the world there were some reduced to an income of forty crowns a year, as I formerly was."
"Do you know," said a learned member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres, "that it cost Lucullus, for every supper he gave in the saloon of Apollo, thirty-nine thousand three hundred and twelve livres of our money; but that the celebrated epicurean Atticus did not expend above two hundred and thirty livres a month for his table."
"If that be true," said I, "he deserved to be president of the Miser-society, lately established in Italy. I have read, as you have done, in Florus, that incredible anecdote; but, perhaps Florus had never supped with Atticus, or else his text, like so many others,
