brief and necessary prelude to "a far more exceeding and
eternal weight of glory."

MARCUS AURELIUS.

CHAPTER I.

THE EDUCATION OF AN EMPEROR.

The life of the noblest of Pagan Emperors may well follow that of the
noblest of Pagan slaves. Their glory shines the purer and brighter from
the midst of a corrupt and deplorable society. Epictetus showed that a
Phrygian slave could live a life of the loftiest exaltation; Aurelius
proved that a Roman Emperor could live a life of the deepest humility.
The one--a foreigner, feeble, deformed, ignorant, born in squalor, bred
in degradation, the despised chattel of a despicable freedman,
surrounded by every depressing, ignoble, and pitiable circumstance of
life--showed how one who seemed born to be a wretch could win noble
happiness and immortal memory; the other--a Roman, a patrician, strong,
of heavenly beauty, of noble ancestors, almost born to the purple, the
favourite of Emperors, the greatest conquerer, the greatest philosopher,
the greatest ruler of his time-proved for ever that it is possible to be
virtuous, and tender, and holy, and contented in the midst of sadness,
even on an irresponsible and imperial throne. Strange that, of the two,
the Emperor is even sweeter, more simple, more admirable, more humbly
and touchingly resigned, than the slave. In him, Stoicism loses all its
haughty self-assertion, all its impracticable paradox, for a manly
melancholy which at once troubles and charms the heart. "It seems," says
M. Martha, "that in him the philosophy of heathendom grows less proud,
draws nearer and nearer to a Christianity which it ignored or which it
despised, and is ready to fling itself into the arms of the 'Unknown
God.' In the sad _Meditations_ of Aurelius we find a pure serenity,
sweetness, and docility to the commands of God, which before him were
unknown, and which Christian grace has alone surpassed. If he has not
yet attained to charity in all that fulness of meaning which
Christianity has given to the word he has already gained its unction,
and one cannot read his book, unique in the history of Pagan philosophy,
without thinking of the sadness of Pascal and the gentleness of Fenelon.
We must pause before this soul, so lofty and so pure, to contemplate
ancient virtue in its softest brilliancy, to see the moral delicacy to
which profane doctrines have attained--how they laid down their pride,
and how penetrating a grace they have found in their ne