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He held a copy of Virgil in his hand, but he was not reading; he was repeating passages of it by heart. They related to the quiet life. His son heard him saying softly: "'O Fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, Agricolas!" His mind was possibly far back in the past. His placid face lit up with the smile that always shone there when his son appeared. "Well, what's the news?" he asked.
And yet how happy were they sua si bona norint! Think what a comfort it would be to belong to a little state like this; not to abuse their privilege, but philosophically to use it. If I were a Belgian, I would not care one single fig about politics. I would not read thundering leading-articles. I would not have an opinion. What's the use of an opinion here?
'O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint! Virgil's exclamation is as true now as it was when he sang the labours of Italian country-folk some nineteen centuries ago. To a traveller from the north there is a pathos even in the contrast between the country in which these children of a happier climate toil, and those bleak, winter-beaten fields where our own peasants pass their lives.
Better small safe profits which should last, he thought, than a haul, which after all must be limited to the amount of the school-boys' pocket-money, and be shared with his son, and the stoppage of all his little sources of profit. Not to mention the prospect of legal punishment. So the thirty had to go away again grumbling, with their money in their pockets. O fortunati, si sua bona norint.
I make them my compliments on their sagacity, intelligence, and attractions, but I utterly refuse to them any sympathy for supposed wrongs. O fortunatas, sua si bona norint! Whether or no, were I an American married man and father of a family, I should not go in for the rights of man that is altogether another question.
He went past Pamphlett's Bank, never so much as turnin' to look at it." Nicky-Nan belonged, congenitally and unconsciously, to that happy brotherhood of men felices sua si bona norint whom a little liquor exhilarates, but even a great deal has no power to bemuse. But what avails an immunity above your fellows, if life seldom or never gives you opportunity to prove it?
He who wrote, "O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint agricolas," might have written quite as truly, "O infortunatos nimium sua si mala norint"; and there are few of us who are not protected from the keenest pain by our inability to see what it is that we have done, what we are suffering, and what we truly are. Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.
Unconcerned at the progress of the world without, unspoiled by the gold of the forestiere, the Procidani pursue the even tenor of their old-fashioned ways, unenvious of and unenvied by their neighbours on the mainland. “O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona nôrint, Agricolas!”
But whether that name was coupled with present felicity or future hopes I do not recollect. But du Maurier's lines describe him and our chumship much better than any words of mine could do. He says: "To BOBTAIL. Oh, fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint All lazy beggars like me "
Clearly a recast of the phrase of Vergil, 'O fortunati nimium sua si bona nôrint Agricolae.
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