igh places; for that testimony to the worth of goodness is
the most striking which is borne by those to whom all the means of
pleasure and self-indulgence lay open, by those who had at their command
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Marcus Aurelius was the
ruler of the grandest of empires; and he was one of the best of men.
Besides him, history presents one or two sovereigns eminent for their
goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred. But Marcus Aurelius has, for us
moderns, this great superiority in interest over Saint Louis or Alfred,
that he lived and acted in a state of society modern by its essential
characteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant centre of
civilization. Trajan talks of "our enlightened age" just as glibly as
the _Times_[206] talks of it. Marcus Aurelius thus becomes for us a man
like ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are. Saint Louis[207]
inhabits an atmosphere of mediaeval Catholicism, which the man of the
nineteenth century may admire, indeed, may even passionately wish to
inhabit, but which, strive as he will, he cannot really inhabit. Alfred
belongs to a state of society (I say it with all deference to the
_Saturday Review_[208] critic who keeps such jealous watch over the
honor of our Saxon ancestors) half barbarous. Neither Alfred nor Saint
Louis can be morally and intellectually as near to us as Marcus
Aurelius.

The record of the outward life of this admirable man has in it little of
striking incident. He was born at Rome on the 26th of April, in the year
121 of the Christian era. He was nephew and son-in-law to his
predecessor on the throne, Antoninus Pius. When Antoninus died, he was
forty years old, but from the time of his earliest manhood he had
assisted in administering public affairs. Then, after his uncle's death
in 161, for nineteen years he reigned as emperor. The barbarians were
pressing on the Roman frontier, and a great part of Marcus Aurelius's
nineteen years of reign was passed in campaigning. His absences from
Rome were numerous and long. We hear of him in Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt,
Greece; but, above all, in the countries on the Danube, where the war
with the barbarians was going on,--in Austria, Moravia, Hungary. In
these countries much of his Journal seems to have been written; parts of
it are dated from them; and there, a few weeks before his fifty-ninth
birthday, he fell sick and died.[209] The record of him on which his
fame chiefly