o which it gave birth.
Horace is its poet-laureate; and he was evidently as sincere in his
philosophy as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in
good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is
his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality
which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes
Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public
morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is
warded off by the formidable barriers of grammar and dictionary.

While Epicureanism thus generated, on the one hand, in men of the world
laxity of moral principle and habit, on the other hand, in minds of a more
contemplative cast, it *lapsed into atheism*. From otiose gods, careless
of human affairs, the transition was natural to a belief in no gods. The
universe which could preserve and govern itself, could certainly have
sprung into uncaused existence; for the tendencies which, without a
supervising power, maintain order in nature, continuity in change,
ever-new life evolved from incessant death, must be inherent tendencies to
combination, harmony, and organization, and thus may account for the
origin of the system which they sustain and renew. This type of atheism
has its most authentic exposition in the "De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius.
He does not, in so many words, deny the being of the gods,--he, indeed,
speaks of them as leading restful lives, withdrawn from all care of mortal
affairs; but he so scoffs at all practical recognition of them, and so
jeers at the reverence and awe professed for them by the multitude, that
we are constrained to regard them as rather the imagery of his verse than
the objects of his faith. He maintains the past eternity of matter, which
consists of atoms or monads of various forms. These, drifting about in
space, and impinging upon one another, by a series of happy chances, fell
into orderly relations and close-fitting symmetries, whence, in
succession, and by a necessity inherent in the primitive atoms, came
organization, life, instinct, love, reason, wisdom. This poem has a
peculiar value at the present day, as closely coincident in its cosmogony
with one of the most recent phases of physical philosophy, and showing
that what calls itself progress may be motion in a circle.

The *Stoics*, so called from a portico(19) adorned with magnificent
paintings by Polygnotu