escaped praising a person whom you did not want to
praise, and you have escaped the necessity of tolerating the upstart
impertinence of his menials."

Some parts of this last thought have been so beautifully expressed by
the American poet Lowell that I will conclude this chapter in his words:

"Earth hath her price for what earth gives us;
The beggar is tax'd for a corner to die in;
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrieves us;
We bargain for the graves we lie in:
At the devil's mart are all things sold,
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold,
For a cap and bells our lives we pay.
Bubbles we earn with our whole soul's tasking,
'_Tis only God that is given away,
'Tis only heaven may be had for the asking_."

CHAPTER II.

LIFE AND VIEWS OF EPICTETUS _(continued)_.

Whether any of these great thoughts would have suggested themselves
_spontaneously_ to Epictetus--whether there was an inborn wisdom and
nobleness in the mind of this slave which would have enabled him to
elaborate such views from his own consciousness, we cannot tell; they do
not, however, express _his_ sentiments only, but belong in fact to the
moral teaching of the great Stoic school, in the doctrines of which he
had received instruction.

It may sound strange to the reader that one situated as Epictetus was
should yet have had a regular tutor to train him in Stoic doctrines.
That such should have been the case appears at first sight inconsistent
with the cruelty with which he was treated, but it is a fact which is
capable of easy explanation. In times of universal luxury and
display--in times when a sort of surface-refinement is found among all
the wealthy--some sort of respect is always paid to intellectual
eminence, and intellectual amusements are cultivated as well as those of
a coarser character. Hence a rich Roman liked to have people of literary
culture among his slaves; he liked to have people at hand who would get
him any information which he might desire about books, who could act as
his amanuenses, who could even correct and supply information for his
original compositions. Such learned slaves formed part of every large
establishment, and among them were usually to be found some who bore, if
they did not particularly merit, the title of "philosophers." These
men--many of whom are described as having been mere impostors,
ostentatious pedants, or ignorant hypoc