lined as much as possible all golden statues and
triumphal designations. All inevitable luxuries and splendour, such as
his public duties rendered indispensable, he regarded as a mere hollow
show. Marcus Aurelius felt as deeply as our own Shakespeare seems to
have felt the unsubstantiality, the fleeting evanescence of all earthly
things: he would have delighted in the sentiment that,

"_We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded by a sleep_."

"When we have meat before us," he says, "and such eatables, we receive
the impression that this is the dead body of a fish, and this is the
dead body of a bird, or of a pig; _and, again, that this Falerian is
only a little grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep's wool dyed
with the blood of a shellfish_: such then are these impressions, and
they reach the things themselves and penetrate them, and so we see what
kind of things they are. Just in the same way.... where there are things
which appear most worthy of our approbation, _we ought to lay them bare,
and look at their worthlessness_, and strip them of all the words by
which they are exalted." (vi. 13.)

"What is worth being valued? To be received with clapping of hands? No.
Neither must we value the clapping of tongues, for the praise which
comes from the many is a clapping of tongues." (vi. 16.)

"Asia, Europe, are corners of the universe; all the sea is a drop in the
universe; Athos a little clod of the universe; all the present time is a
point in eternity. All things are _little, changeable, perishable"_
(vi. 36.)

And to Marcus too, no less than to Shakespeare, it seemed that--

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;"

for he writes these remarkable words:--

"_The idle business of show, plays on the stage, flocks of sheep, herds,
exercises with spears, a bone cast to little dogs, a bit of bread in
fishponds, labourings of ants, and burden-carrying runnings about of
frightened little mice, puppets pulled by strings_--this is what life
resembles. It is thy duty then in the midst of such things to show good
humour, and not a proud air; to understand however that _every man is
worth just so much as the things are worth about which he
busies himself_."

In fact, the Court was to Marcus a burden; he tells us himself that
Philosophy was his mother, Empire only his stepmother; it was only his
repose in the one that rendered eve