o oppose an imperial tyrant? It
abandoned Brutus, as he sorrowfully confessed, in his greatest need, and
it forced Cato, as his panegyrist strangely boasts, into the false
position of defying heaven. How few can be counted among its professors,
who, like Polemo, were thereby converted from a profligate course, or like
Anaxagoras, thought the world well lost in exchange for its possession?
The philosopher in Rasselas taught a superhuman doctrine, and then
succumbed without an effort to a trial of human affection.

"He discoursed," we are told, "with great energy on the government of the
passions. His look was venerable, his action graceful, his pronunciation
clear, and his diction elegant. He showed, with great strength of
sentiment and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and
debased, when the lower faculties predominate over the higher. He
communicated the various precepts given, from time to time, for the
conquest of passion, and displayed the happiness of those who had obtained
the important victory, after which man is no longer the slave of fear, nor
the fool of hope.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} He enumerated many examples of heroes immoveable by
pain or pleasure, who looked with indifference on those modes or accidents
to which the vulgar give the names of good and evil."

Rasselas in a few days found the philosopher in a room half darkened, with
his eyes misty, and his face pale. "Sir," said he, "you have come at a
time when all human friendship is useless; what I suffer cannot be
remedied, what I have lost cannot be supplied. My daughter, my only
daughter, from whose tenderness I expected all the comforts of my age,
died last night of a fever." "Sir," said the prince, "mortality is an
event by which a wise man can never be surprised; we know that death is
always near, and it should therefore always be expected." "Young man,"
answered the philosopher, "you speak like one who has never felt the pangs
of separation." "Have you, then, forgot the precept," said Rasselas,
"which you so powerfully enforced?{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} consider that external things are
naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same." "What
comfort," said the mourner, "can truth and reason afford me? Of what
effect are they now, but to tell me that my daughter will not be
restored?"

8.

Better, far better, to make no professions, you will say, than to cheat
others with what we are not, and to scandalize the