ct,
and developing only a single side of their nature, their minds became
narrow and their views contracted. Thus, while the Epicureans, urging
men to study nature in order to banish superstition, endeavoured to
correct the ignorance of physical science which was one of the chief
impediments to the progress of the ancient mind, the Stoics for the most
part disdained a study which was other than the pursuit of virtue. While
the Epicurean poet painted in magnificent language the perpetual
progress of mankind, the Stoic was essentially retrospective, and
exhausted his strength in vain efforts to restore the simplicity of a
by-gone age. While, too, the school of Zeno produced many of the best
and greatest men who have ever lived, it must be acknowledged that its
records exhibit a rather unusual number of examples of high professions
falsified in action, and of men who, displaying in some forms the most
undoubted and transcendent virtue, fell in others far below the average
of mankind. The elder Cato, who, though not a philosopher, was a model
of philosophers, was conspicuous for his inhumanity to his slaves.
Brutus was one of the most extortionate usurers of his time, and several
citizens of Salamis died of starvation, imprisoned because they could
not pay the sum he demanded. No one eulogised more eloquently the
austere simplicity of life which stoicism advocated than Sallust, who in
a corrupt age was notorious for his rapacity. Seneca himself was
constitutionally a nervous and timid man, endeavouring, not always with
success, to support himself by a sublime philosophy. He guided, under
circumstances of extreme difficulty, the cause of virtue, and his death
is one of the noblest antiquity records; but his life was deeply marked
by the taint of flattery, and not free from the taint of avarice, and it
is unhappily certain that, after its accomplishment, he lent his pen to
conceal or varnish one of the worst crimes of Nero. The courage of Lucan
failed signally under torture, and the flattery which he bestowed upon
Nero, in his "Pharsalia," ranks with the Epigrams of Martial as probably
the extreme limit of sycophancy to which Roman literature descended.

While, too, the main object of the Stoics was to popularise philosophy,
the high standard of self-control they exacted rendered their system
exceedingly unfit for the great majority of mankind, and for the
ordinary condition of affairs. Life is history, not poetry. It consists