iness. To a spiritual being, virtue _might_ be the chief good;
but in actual life our physical is closely bound up with our mental
enjoyment, and pain is one of those stern facts before which all theories
are powerless. Again, by their fondness for paradox, they reduce all
offences to the same dead level. It is, in their eyes, as impious to
beat a slave as to beat a parent: because, as they say, "nothing can be
_more_ virtuous than virtue,--nothing _more_ vicious than vice".
And lastly, this stubbornness of opinion affects their personal character.
They too often degenerate into austere critics and bitter partisans, and
go far to banish from among us love, friendship, gratitude, and all the
fair humanities of life.

The fifth book carries us back some twenty years, when we find Cicero once
more at Athens, taking his afternoon walk among the deserted groves of
the Academy. With him are his brother Quintus, his cousin Lucius, and
his friends Piso and Atticus. The scene, with its historic associations,
irresistibly carries their minds back to those illustrious spirits who had
once made the place their own. Among these trees Plato himself had walked;
under the shadow of that Porch Zeno had lectured to his disciples;[1]
yonder Quintus points out the "white peak of Colonus", described by
Sophocles in "those sweetest lines;" while glistening on the horizon were
the waves of the Phaleric harbour, which Demosthenes, Cicero's own
great prototype, had outvoiced with the thunder of his declamation. So
countless, indeed, are the memories of the past called up by the genius
of the place, that (as one of the friends remarks) "wherever we plant
our feet, we tread upon some history". Then Piso, speaking at Cicero's
request, begs his friends to turn from the degenerate thinkers of their
own day to those giants of philosophy, from whose writings all liberal
learning, all history, and all elegance of language may be derived. More
than all, they should turn to the leader of the Peripatetics, Aristotle,
who seemed (like Lord Bacon after him) to have taken all knowledge as his
portion. From these, if from no other source, we may learn the secret of a
happy life. But first we must settle what this 'chief good' is--this end
and object of our efforts--and not be carried to and fro, like ships
without a steersman, by every blast of doctrine.

[Footnote 1: The Stoics took their name from the 'stoa', or portico in the
Academy, where they _sat_ at l