Some Remarks on Good Breeding
A friend of yours and mine has justly defined good breeding to be "the result of much good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others, and with a view to obtain the same indulgence from them." Taking this for granted (as I think it cannot be disputed), it is astonishing to me that anybody who had good sense and good nature (and I believe you have both) can essentially fail in good breeding. As to the modes of it, indeed, they vary according to persons, places, and circumstances, and are only to be acquired by observation and experience; but the substance of it is everywhere and eternally the same. Good manners are to particular societies what good morals are to society in general—their cement and their security. And as laws are enacted to enforce good morals, or at least to prevent the ill effects of bad ones, so there are certain rules of civility, universally implied and received, to enforce good manners and punish bad ones. And indeed there seems to me to be less difference, both between the crimes and punishments, than at first one would imagine.... Mutual complaisances, attentions, and sacrifices of little conveniences, are as natural an implied compact between civilized people as protection and obedience are between kings and subjects: whoever in either case violates that compact, justly forfeits all advantages arising from it. For my own part, I really think that next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing: and the epithet which I should covet the most, next to that of Aristides, would be that of "well-bred."
THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION
From 'Miscellaneous Works'
It is very certain that no man is fit for everything; but it is almost as certain too that there is scarce any one man who is not fit for something, which something nature plainly points out to him by giving him a tendency and propensity to it. I look upon common-sense to be to the mind what conscience is to the heart,—the faithful and constant monitor of what is right or wrong. And I am convinced that no man commits either a crime or a folly but against the manifest and sensible representations of the one or the other. Every man finds in himself, either from nature or education,—for they are hard to distinguish,—a peculiar bent and disposition to some particular character; and his struggling against it is the fruitless and endless labor of Sisyphus. Let him follow and cultivate that vocation, he will succeed in it, and be considerable in one way at least; whereas if he departs from it he will at best be inconsiderable, probably ridiculous.
THE LITERATURE OF CHINA
BY ROBERT K. DOUGLAS
he distinguishing feature and the crowning glory of the Chinese nation is its literature. It is true that the Chinese can boast of an ancient empire, of a time-honored civilization, of conquests in the fields of science, and, in spite of recent events, in the field of battle; but in the mind of every true Son of Han these titles to fame sink into insignificance before that of the possession of a literature which dates back to a time when the Western world was yet in a state of barbarism, and which as centuries have rolled by has been worthily supplemented in every branch of knowledge.
Confucius
It may now be accepted as beyond dispute that the Chinese migrated into China from southwestern Asia about B.C. 2300, bringing with them a knowledge of writing, and in all probability the beginnings of a literature. In the records of that distant past, history and fable are so closely intermingled that it is difficult to pronounce definitely upon any subject treated in them, and we are compelled to seek in comparative philology for reasonable explanations of many points which Chinese chroniclers are content to leave, not from want of assertion, in the mists of uncertainty.
By common consent it is acknowledged that the 'Yi King,' Book of Changes, is the oldest work extant in Chinese literature; though other works, the names of which only have come down to us, were contemporaneously current in the country. A peculiar veneration is naturally felt by the Chinese for this sole surviving waif from a past literature; and from the time of Confucius downward, scholars of every age have attempted to explain its mystic pages. The basis of the work is popularly believed to be eight diagrams, which are said to have been designed by Fuh-hi (B.C. 2852), and which by subdivision have become multiplied into sixty-four. One of these stands at the head of each of the sixty-four chapters into which the work is now divided. Following these diagrams is in each case an initial character, with short phrases which have been held by Confucius and every subsequent native commentator to explain the meaning of the diagrams. But the key to the puzzle was denied to these scholars, who made confusion worse confounded by their attempts to make sense of that which was unintelligible to them. So mysterious a text was naturally believed to be a work on divination; and accepting this cue, the commentators devoted their energies to forcing into the Procrustean bed of divination the disjointed phrases which follow the diagrams. The solution of the mystery, which had escaped the keen study of five-and-twenty centuries of native scholars, was discovered by the late Professor Terrieu de la Couperie, who by many irrefragable proofs demonstrated that the 'Yi King' consists "of old fragments of early times in China, mostly of a lexical character." With this explanation the futility of the attempts of the native scholars to translate it as a connected text at once becomes apparent. A large proportion of the chapters are merely syllabaries, similar to those of Chaldea. The initial character represents the word to be explained, and the phrases following express its various meanings.
An excellent translation of the 'Yi King' as it is understood by native scholars was published by Professor Legge in 'The Sacred Books of the East' (1882); and a comparison of his translation of the seventh chapter with Professor T. de la Couperie's rendering of the same passage must be enough to convince the most skeptical that even if he is not absolutely correct, the native scholars must undoubtedly be wrong. The chapter is headed by a diagram consisting of five divided lines and one undivided; and the initial character is Sze, which is described in modern dictionaries as meaning "a teacher," "instructor," "model," "an army," "a poet," "a multitude," "the people," "all," "laws," "an elder." Of the phrases which follow, Professor Legge gives the following rendering:—
"Sze indicates how, in the case which it supposes, with firmness and correctness, and "The first line, divided, shows the host going forward according to the rules [for such a movement]. If these be not good, there will be evil. "The second line, undivided, shows [the leader] in the midst of his host. There will be good fortune and no error. The king has thrice conveyed to him the orders [of his favor]. "The third line, divided, shows how the host may possibly have many inefficient leaders. There will be evil. "The fourth line, divided, shows the host in retreat. There is no error. "The fifth line, divided, shows birds in the fields, which it will be advantageous to seize and destroy. In that case there will be no error. If the oldest son leads the host, and younger men [idly occupy offices assigned to them], however firm and correct he may be, there will be evil. "The topmost line, divided, shows the great ruler delivering his charges [appointing some], to be rulers of States, and others to undertake the headship of clans; but small men should not be employed [in such positions]." From an inscription attributed to the Emperor Yao, 2350 B.C. It is impossible to read such an extract as the above without being convinced that the explanation was not that which was intended by the author or authors; and on the doctrine of probabilities, a perusal of the following version by Professor T. de la Couperie would incline us to accept his conclusions. But his theory does not rest on probabilities alone; he is able to support it with many substantial proofs: and though exception may possibly be taken to some of his renderings of individual phrases, his general views may be held to be firmly established. This is his version of the chapter quoted above, with the exception of the words of good or ill omen:— "Sze [is] a righteous great man. The Sze defines laws not biased. The centre of the army. The three conveying orders [officers] of the Sovereign. Sze [is] also corpse-like. Sze [is] an assistant officer. In the fields are birds [so called]; many take the name [?] The elder sons [are] the leaders of the army. The younger [are] the passive multitude [?] Great Princes instructing. The group of men who have helped in the organization of the kingdom. People gathered by the Wu flag [?]." From what has been said, as well as from the above extracts, it will be observed that to all except the native scholars who imagine that they see in its pages deep divinatory lore, the chief interest of the 'Yi King' lies in the linguistic and ethnographical indications which it contains, and which at present we can but dimly discern. It is difficult to assign a date to it, but it is certain that it existed before the time of King Wên (B.C. 1143), who with his son the Duke of Chow edited the text and added a commentary to it. That parts of it are very much earlier than this period there can be no doubt; and it is safe to assume that in the oldest portion of the work we have one of the first literary efforts of the Chinese. It was not, however, until the time of Confucius that the foundations of the national literature may be said to have been laid. From constant references in the early histories it is obvious that before that period a literature of a certain kind existed. The Chinese have an instinctive love of letters, and we know from the records that to the courts of the various princes were attached historians whose duty it was to collect the folk-lore songs of the people of the various States. "If a man were permitted to make all the ballads of a nation, he need not care who should make its laws," said Sir Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. So thought the Chinese legislators, who designed their enactments with direct regard to the dispositions of the people as displayed in their songs. At the time of Confucius (B.C. 551-479) a large collection of these ballads existed in the archives of the sovereign State of Chow; and as is generally believed, the sage revised the collection, and omitting those he considered unworthy of preservation, formed an edition containing three hundred and five pieces. This work has come down to us under the title of the 'Shih King' or Book of Odes. The ballads are just such as we should expect to find under the circumstances. They are plainly the utterances of the people in a primitive state of civilization, who nevertheless enjoyed considerable freedom; and though they occasionally had to lament the tyranny of individual princes, they cannot be described as having been among the down-trodden nations of the earth. The domesticity which is still a distinctive feature of Chinese life figures largely in them, and the filial piety which to the present day is so highly esteemed finds constant expression. The measure in which the odes have been handed down to us makes it difficult to understand how any rhythm could be found in them. With few exceptions they are all written in lines of four characters each, and as read at the present day, consist therefore of only four syllables. This seems to be so stunted and unnatural a metre that one is inclined to accept Professor T. de la Couperie's suggestion, for which he had much to say,—that at the time at which they were sung, the characters which now represent a syllable each were polysyllabic. It would seem probable that certainly in some cases compound characters were pronounced as compounded of syllables in accordance with their component parts, as certain of them are read by the Japanese at the present time. Numerous translations of the odes into European languages have been made, and the following extracts from Professor Legge's rendering of the second ode, celebrating the industry and filial piety of the reigning queen, give a good idea of the general tone of the pieces. "Sweet was the scene. The spreading dolichos Now back to my old home, my parents dear Such were the odes which Confucius found collected ready to his hand; and faithful to his character of transmitter of the wisdom of the ancients, he made them the common property of his countrymen. But these were not the only records at the court of Chow which attracted his attention. He found there historical documents, containing the leading events in the history of the Chinese States from the middle of the twenty-third century B.C. to 721. These curious records of a past time possessed an irresistible attraction for him. By constant study he made them his own, and with loving care collated and edited the texts. These fragments are, from a historical point of view, of great value; and they incidentally furnish evidence of the fact that China was not always the stage on which the Chinese people have played their parts. There is no sign in these records of the first steps in ethics and science which one would expect to find in the primitive history of a race. The utterances of the sovereigns and sages, with which they abound, are marked by a comparatively matured knowledge and an advanced ethical condition. The knowledge of astronomy displayed, though not profound, is considerable, and the directions given by the Emperor Yao to his astronomers royal are quite such as may have been given by any Emperor of China until the advent of the Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century; and the moral utterances of the sovereigns and their ministers are on a par with the sentiments expressed in the Peking Gazette at the present time. "Virtue," said the minister Yi addressing his Emperor Yü, "is the basis of good government; and this consists first in procuring for the people the things necessary for their sustenance, such as water, fire, metals, wood, and grain. The ruler must also think of rendering them virtuous, and of preserving them from whatever can injure life and health. When you would caution them, use gentle words; when you would correct, employ authority." "Do not be ashamed of mistakes, and thus make them crimes," was another piece of advice uttered forty centuries ago, which has a peculiarly modern ring about it. According to the system in vogue at the Chinese courts, the duty of recording historical events was confided to historians of the right hand and of the left. To the latter was given the duty of recording the speeches and edicts of the sovereigns and their ministers, and to the first that of compiling chronicles of events. The historians who had placed on record the documents which Confucius edited in the 'Shu King' or Book of History were historians of the left hand, and in the only original work which we have by the Sage—'The Spring and Autumn Annals'—he constituted himself a historian of the right. In this work he traces the history of his native State of Lu from the year B.C. 722 to B.C. 484, and in the baldest and most calendar-like style enumerates, without any comment or expression of opinion, the facts which he considers of sufficient importance to report. However faulty we may consider his manner of treatment, any criticism should be leveled against the system rather than against the author. But in other respects Confucius cannot shelter himself under the plea of usage. As a historian, it was his bounden duty above all things to tell the truth, and to distribute praise and blame without fear or favor. In this elementary duty Confucius failed, and has left us a record in which he has obviously made events to chime in with his preconceived ideas and opinions. Considering the assumption of virtue with which Confucius always clothed himself, this is the more noticeable; and still more is it remarkable that his disciples should be so overcome by the glamour which attached to his name, that his obvious lapses from the truth are not only left unnoted, but the general tone and influence of the work are described in the most eulogistic terms. "The world," said Mencius, "had fallen into decay and right principles had dwindled away. Perverse discourses and oppressive deeds had again waxen rife. Cases had occurred of ministers who had murdered their rulers, and of sons who had murdered their fathers. Confucius was afraid and made the 'Ch'un ch'iu.'" So great, we are told, was the effect of the appearance of this work that "rebellious ministers quaked with fear, and undutiful sons were overcome with terror." Love of truth is not a characteristic of the Chinese people; and unhappily their greatest men, Confucius among them, have shown their countrymen a lamentable example in this respect. So great is the admiration of the people for this work of Confucius that by universal consent the 'Ch'un ch'iu' has through all ages been included among the Five Classics of the country. Three others have already been spoken of, and there remains only one more, the Book of Rites, to mention. This work is the embodiment of, and authority for, the ceremonial which influences the national policy of the country, and directs the individual destinies of the people. We are informed on the highest authority that there are three hundred rules of ceremony and three thousand rules of behavior. Under a code so overwhelmingly oppressive, it is difficult to imagine how the race can continue to exist; but five-and-twenty centuries of close attention to the Book of Rites have so molded the nation within the lines of the ceremonial which it prescribes, that acquiescence with its rules has become a second nature with the people, and requires no more guiding effort on their part than does the automatic action of the nerves and limbs at the bidding of the brain. Within its voluminous pages every act which one man should perform to another is carefully and fully provided for; and this applies not only to the daily life of the people, but also to the official acts of the whole hierarchy of power from the Emperor downward. No court ceremony is undertaken without its guidance, and no official deed is done throughout the length and breadth of the eighteen Provinces of the Empire without its sanction. Its spirit penetrates every Yamên and permeates every household. It regulates the sacrifices which should be offered to the gods, it prescribes the forms to be observed by the Son of Heaven in his intercourse with his ministers, it lays down the behavior proper to officials of all ranks, and it directs the conduct of the people in every relation of life. It supplements in a practical form the teachings of Confucius and others, and forms the most important link in the chain which binds the people to the chariot wheels of the "Sages." Of canonical authority equal to the Five Classics if not greater, are the 'Four Books' in which are recorded the ipsissima verba of Confucius. These are the 'Lunyü' or Sayings of Confucius, twenty books, which contains a detailed description of the Sage's system of philosophy; the 'Ta Hsio,' the Great Learning, ten chapters; the 'Chung yung,' or the Doctrine of the Mean, thirty-three chapters; and the development of Confucianism as enunciated by his great follower Mencius in the 'Mêng tzŭ,' seven books. These works cover the whole field of Confucianism; and as such, their contents claim the allegiance and demand the obedience of ninety-nine out of every hundred Chinamen. To the European student their contents are somewhat disappointing. The system they enunciate wants completeness and life, although the sentiments they express are unexceptionable; as for example when Confucius said: "Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles. Have no friends not equal to yourself. When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them." Admirable maxims such as these flowed from his lips in abundance, but he could offer no reason why a man should rather obey the advice thus presented than his own inclination. He had no reward to offer for virtue, and no terrors with which to threaten the doers of evil. In no sense do his teachings as they came from his lips constitute a religion. He inculcated no worship of the Deity, and he refrained altogether from declaring his belief or disbelief in a future existence. The author of the 'Great Learning,' commonly said to be the disciple Tsêng, describes the object of his work to be "to illustrate illustrious virtue; to renovate the people; and to rest in the highest excellence." And following on the lines indicated by his great master, he lays down the ethical means by which these admirable ends may in his opinion be attained. The 'Doctrine of the Mean' takes for its text the injunction, "Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish." The author of this work, Tzŭssŭ, goes deeper into the motives of human conduct than Confucius himself. "First he shows clearly how the path of duty is to be traced to its origin in Heaven, and is unchangeable, while the substance of it is provided in ourselves, and may not be departed from. Next he speaks of the importance of preserving and nourishing this, and of exercising a watchful self-scrutiny with reference to it. Finally he speaks of the meritorious achievements and transforming influence of sage and spiritual men in their highest extent." In the teachings of Mencius (B.C. 372-289) we see a distinct advance on the doctrines of Confucius. He was a man of a far more practical frame of mind than his great predecessor, and possessed the courage necessary to speak plainly in the presence of kings and rulers. His knowledge of political economy was considerable, and he brought to the test of experience many of the opinions and doctrines which Confucius was willing to express only in the abstract. Filial piety was his constant theme. "The richest fruit of benevolence is this," he said,—"the service of one's parents. The richest fruit of righteousness is this,—the obeying of one's elder brothers. The richest fruit of wisdom is this,—the knowing of these two things, and not departing from them." These Five Classics and Four Books may be said to be the foundations on which all Chinese literature has been based. The period when Confucius and Mencius taught and wrote was one of great mental activity all over the world. While the wise men of China were proclaiming their system of philosophy, the Seven Sages of Greece were pouring out words of wisdom in the schools at Athens, and the sound of the voice of Buddha (died 480 B.C.) had hardly ceased to be heard under the bôdhi tree in Central India. From such beginnings arose the literatures which have since added fame and splendor to the three countries in Asia and Europe. In China the impetus given by these pioneers of learning was at once felt, and called into existence a succession of brilliant writers who were as distinguished for the boldness of their views as for the freedom with which they gave them utterance. The main subject discussed by these men was the principle underlying the Confucian system; namely, that man's nature is in its origin perfectly good, and that so long as each one remains uncontaminated by the world and the things of the world, the path of virtue is to him the path of least resistance. While therefore a man is able to remain unenticed by the temptations which necessarily surround him, he advances in spotless purity towards perfection, until virtue becomes in him so confirmed a habit that neither the stings of conscience nor the exertion of intellectual effort is required to maintain him in his position of perfect goodness and of perfect peace. These are still the opinions of orthodox Confucianists, but at different times scholars have arisen, who from their own experiences in the world, have come to conclusions diametrically opposed to those taught by the Sage. In their opinion the Psalmist was right when he said, "The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." Scarcely had Confucius been gathered to his fathers when the Philosopher Hsün enunciated this view, and since then the doctrine has formed the chief ground of contention among all schools of philosophy down to the present day. By certain writers it has been held that in man's nature there is a mixture of good and evil, and by no one was this view more ably expounded than by the philosopher Chu Hi (A.D. 1130-1200). In season and out of season this great writer, who has done more than any one else to elucidate the dark pages of the classics, "taught that good and evil were present in the heart of every man, and that just as in nature a duality of powers is necessary to the existence of nature itself, so good and evil are inseparably present in the heart of every human being." But there were others who felt that the bald and conventional system proclaimed by Confucius was insufficient to satisfy the desire for the supernatural which is implanted in men of every race and of every clime, and then at once a school arose, headed by Laotzŭ (sixth century B.C.), the Old Philosopher; which, adopting the spirit of Brahminism, taught its sectaries to seek by self-abnegation freedom from the entanglements of the world, and a final absorption into the Deity. The minds of most Chinamen are not attuned to the apprehension of philosophical subtleties, and the wisdom imparted by Laotzŭ to his countrymen in the pages of his 'Taotê King' (The Book of Reason and Virtue), soon became debased into a superstitious system by a succession of charlatans, who, adopting Laotzŭ's doctrine that death was only another form of life, taught their followers to seek to prolong the pleasures of the present state of existence by searching in the mazes of alchemy for the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. Before the faith reached this degraded position, however, several writers supplemented and enlarged on the doctrines advanced by Laotzŭ. Foremost among these were Litzŭ and Chwangtzŭ, who were both men of great metaphysical ability, and whose speculations, though not always in harmony with those of their great master, help to some extent to elucidate his system and certainly add considerable interest to it. Around the systems of Confucius and Laotzŭ a considerable literature grew up, which was cherished, copied, and discussed by all those scholars who had time to spare from the contemplation of the records of the various States into which the country was divided. These records had assumed a permanent place in the literature of the land, and were bound up with the feudal system which then existed. The time came, however, when this feudal system was destined to come to an end. In the third century before Christ a leader arose who proclaimed the States an Empire and himself as Emperor. To so conservatively minded a people as the Chinese the revolution was difficult of acceptance, and Shi Hwangti, seeking to facilitate the transfer of their allegiance, ordered the destruction of all books which might preserve the memory of a bygone constitution. With ruthless severity the ukase was put into force, and all works, with the exception of those on medicine and alchemy, were thrown to the flames. Happily no tyrant, however powerful, can enforce the complete fulfillment of such an edict; and in spite of threats and persecutions, events showed that through all that fiery time manuscripts had been carefully preserved, and that men had been found ready to risk their lives in the sacred cause of learning. Fortunately the Dynasty founded by Shi Hwangti was short-lived, and in 202 B.C. a revolution placed Kao ti, the founder of the Han Dynasty, on the throne. With commendable wisdom Kao ti placed himself at once in complete harmony with the national mind, and had no sooner assumed the imperial yellow than he notified his desire to restore the national literature to its former status. Under his fostering care, manuscripts which had lain hidden were brought out from their places of concealment; and to these works were added others, which were dictated by scholars who had treasured them in their memories. That the works thus again brought out were numerous, is proved by the fact that in the catalogue of the Imperial Library of the Han Dynasty (B.C. 202 to A.D. 25), mention is made of 11,312 works, consisting of volumes on the classics, philosophy, poetry, military tactics, mathematics and medicine. It was during this dynasty that the national history and poetry took their rise in the shapes with which we are now familiar. After the night of turmoil and darkness which had just passed away, men, as though invigorated by the time of sterility, devoted themselves to the production of cultured prose and original though pedantic poetry. It was then that Ssŭma Ch'ien, who has been called the Herodotus of China, wrote his 'Shichi' (Historical Records), which embraces a period of between two and three thousand years; namely, from the reign of Hwang ti (B.C. 2697) to the reign of Wu ti of the Han Dynasty (B.C. 140-86). Following the example of this great chronicler, Pan ku compiled the records of the Han Dynasty in a hundred and twenty books, and it is on the model thus laid down that all succeeding dynastic histories of China have been written. Almost without variation the materials of these vast depositories of information are arranged in the following order:—1. Imperial records, consisting of the purely political events which occurred in each reign. 2. Memoirs, including treatises on mathematical chronology, rites, music, jurisprudence, political economy, State sacrifices, astronomy, elemental influences, geography, literature, biographies, and records of the neighboring countries. Tempora non animi mutant, and in the poetry of this period we see a close resemblance to the spirit which breathes in the odes collected by Confucius. The measure shows signs of some elasticity, five characters to a line taking the place of the older four-syllabled metre; but the ideas which permeate it are the same. Like all Chinese poetry, it is rather quaint than powerful, and is rather noticeable for romantic sweetness than for the expression of strong passions. There is for the most part a somewhat melancholy ring about it. The authors love to lament their absence from home or the oppressed condition of the people, or to enlarge on the depressing effect of rain or snow, and find sadness in the strange beauty of the surrounding scenery or the loveliness of a flower. The diction is smooth and the fancy wandering, but its lines do not much stir the imagination or arouse the passions. These are criticisms which apply to Chinese poetry of all ages. During the T'ang and Sung Dynasties (A.D. 618-1127), periods which have been described as forming the Augustan ages of Chinese literature, poets flourished abundantly, and for the better expression of their ideas they adopted a metre of seven characters or syllables, instead of the earlier and more restricted measures. Tu Fu, Li T'aipai, and a host of others, enriched the national poetry at the time, and varied the subjects which had been the common themes of earlier poets by singing the praises of wine. To be a poet it was considered necessary by them that a man should be a wine-bibber, and their verses describe with enthusiasm the pleasures of the cup and the joys of intoxication. The following is a specimen of such an ode, taken from the works of Li T'aipai:— If life be nothing but an empty dream, When roused to life again, I straightway ask Sad and disturbed, I heave a gentle sigh, But before the time of the T'ang Dynasty a new element had been introduced into the national literature. With the introduction of Buddhism the Chinese became acquainted with religious doctrines and philosophical ideas, of which until then they had only been faintly conscious from their contact with the debased form of Brahminical teaching which under the name of Taoism had long existed in the land. A complete knowledge of the teachings of Sakyamuni was however imparted to them by the arrival, at the beginning of the first century of our era, of two Shamans from India who settled at Loyang in the province of Honan, and who translated the Sanskrit Sutra in forty-two sections into Chinese. From this time onward a constant succession of Buddhist missionaries visited China and labored with indefatigable industry, both by oral teaching and by the translation of Sanskrit works into Chinese, to convert the people to their faith. The knowledge thus acquired was of great advantage to the literature of the country. It enriched it with new ideas, and added wider knowledge to its pages. The history and geography of India, with which scholars had previously been scarcely acquainted, became, though indistinctly, matters of knowledge to them. Already Fahsien, the great forerunner of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims (B.C. 399), had visited India and had described in his 'Fuh kwo chi' (The Records of Buddhist Countries) the wonders which he had seen in Hindustan. With the spread of Buddhism in China, a desire to follow in his footsteps prompted others to undertake the long and arduous journey across the Mongolian steppes and over the passes of the Himalayas into the plains of India. Sung yun in the sixth century and Hüan Ts'ang in the seventh are conspicuous among those who undertook this toilsome pilgrimage in the interest of the faith. Notwithstanding the occasional influx of new sentiments, however, the circumscribed circle of knowledge which was within the reach of Chinese scholars, and the poverty of their vocabulary, have always necessarily limited the wealth of their ideas; and at an early period of the history of the country we see symptoms of sterility creeping over the national mind. It is always easier to remember than to think; and it cannot but be looked upon as a sign of decadence in a literature when collections of ready-made knowledge take the place of original compositions, and when scholars devote themselves to the production of anthologies and encyclopædias instead of seeking out new thoughts and fresh branches of learning. In the sixth century, a period which coincides with the invention of printing, there was first shown that disposition to collect extracts from works of merit into anthologies, which have ever since been such a marked peculiarity of Chinese literature. That the effect of these works, and of the encyclopædias which are in a sense allied to them, has been detrimental to the national mind, there cannot be a doubt. Scholars are no longer required to search for themselves for the golden nuggets of knowledge in the mines of learning. They have but to turn to the great depositories of carefully extracted information, and they find ready to their hand the opinions and thoughts of all those who are considered to be authorities on the subject with which they desire to acquaint themselves. For the purposes of cram for students at the competitive examinations, these treasuries of knowledge are of inestimable value: and by their help, "scholars" who have neither depth of knowledge nor power of thought are able to make a show of erudition which is as hollow as it is valueless. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) this class of literature may be said to have reached its highest development. In the reign of the Emperor Yunglo (1403-1425) was compiled the largest encyclopædia which has ever seen the light. This gigantic work, which was entitled 'Yunglo ta tien,' consisted of no fewer than 22,877 books, and covered every branch of knowledge possessed by the Chinese. Possibly owing to its immense extent, it was never published; and such volumes as still survive the destroying influences of neglect and decay are yet to be found in manuscript on the shelves of the Imperial Library. Inspired perhaps by the example thus set, the Emperor K'anghi of the present dynasty appointed a commission of scholars to compile a similar work; and after forty years had been consumed in extracting from the past literatures every passage bearing on the 6109 headings which it was the will of K'anghi should be illustrated, the compilers were able to lay before their sovereign a work consisting of 5020 volumes, which they entitled 'Kin L'ing ku kin t'u shu chi ch'êng.' Unlike Yunglo's great work, this one was printed; and though only, as it is said, a hundred copies were issued, some still remain of the original edition. One such copy, complete in every particular, is to be seen at the British Museum. For completeness from a Chinese point of view this work stands out pre-eminently above all others; but owing to the very limited number of copies, it has never superseded the 'Wên hsien t'ung k'ao' by Ma Twanlin, which, though published four hundred years earlier, still holds its own in popular estimation. Much has been written by Chinese authors on scientific subjects, but the substance is remarkable for its extent rather than for its value. In each branch of knowledge they have advanced under foreign influence up to a certain point, and beyond that they have been unable to go. Their knowledge of astronomy, which is of Chaldean origin, is sufficient to enable them to calculate eclipses and to recognize the precession of the equinoxes, but it has left them with confused notions on subjects which are matters of common knowledge among Western people. It is the same in the case of medicine. They understand certain general principles of therapeutics and the use of certain herbs; but their knowledge is purely empirical, and their acquaintance with surgery is of the most elementary kind. It is perhaps in their novels and plays, however, that the most marked defects in the national mind become apparent. The systems of education and the consequent mental habit in vogue are the outcomes of that lack of imagination which distinguishes the people, and which finds its reflection in all those branches of literature which are more directly dependent on the flow of new and striking ideas. There is little delineation of character either in their novels or their plays. The personages portrayed are all either models of virtue and learning, or shocking examples of ignorance and turpitude. Their actions are mechanical, and the incidents described have little or no connection with one another. The stories are in fact arranged much as a clever child might be expected to arrange them, and they are by no means free from the weary iterations in which untutored minds are apt to indulge. Chinese scholars are conscious of these defects, and attempt to explain them by describing novel-writing as being beneath the serious attention of all those who are interested in learning. This view is commonly accepted by their learned world, who divide literature into four classes, viz., Classics, History, Philosophy, and Belles-lettres. The last of these does not include either romances or plays; and with the exception of two or three standard works of fiction and the 'Hundred Plays of the Yüan Dynasty' (A.D. 1280-1368), no specimens of either of these two classes of literature would ever be found in a library of standing. But this contempt for works of imagination is probably less the cause of their inferiority than the result of it. The Providence which has given Chinamen untiring diligence, inexhaustible memories, and a love of learning, has not vouchsafed to touch their tongues with the live coal of imagination. They are plodding students, and though quite capable of narrating events and of producing endless dissertations on the interpretation of the classics and the true meaning of the philosophy on which they are based, are entirely unprovided with that power of fancy which is able to bring before the eye, as in a living picture, the phantoms of the brain. Filial piety and fraternal submission, are they not the root of all benevolent actions?—Confucian An., Heo Urh (ch. ii.). The path of duty lies in what is near, and men seek for it in what is remote. The work of duty lies in what is easy, and men seek for it in what is difficult. If each man would love his parents and show due respect to his elders, the whole empire would enjoy tranquillity.—Mencius, Le Low (pt. i., ch. xi.). Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.—Confucian An., Heo Urh (ch. viii.). If what we see is doubtful, how can we believe what is spoken behind the back?—Inscription in "Celestial Influence Temple." Words which are simple, while their meaning is far-reaching, are good words. Principles which are held as compendious, while their application is extensive, are good principles. The words of the superior man are not necessarily high-sounding, but great principles are contained in them.—Mencius, Tsin Sin (ch. xxxii.). The superior man is correctly firm, and not firm merely.—Confucian An., Wei Ling Kung (ch. xxxvi.). For one word a man is often deemed to be wise; and for one word he is often deemed to be foolish. We ought to be careful indeed in what we say.—Confucian An., Observations of Tsze Kung. In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the centre of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.—Doctrine of the Mean (ch. xiv.). God leads men to tranquil security.—Shoo King, ii., Numerous Officers (ch. ii.). The glory and tranquillity of a State may arise from the excellence of one man.—Shoo King, ii., Speech of the Duke of Tsin (ch. viii.). Mencius said, The superior man has two things in which he delights, and to be ruler over the empire is not one of them. That his father and mother are both alive, and that the condition of his brothers affords no cause for anxiety; this is one delight. Then when looking up he has no occasion for shame before heaven, and below he has no occasion to blush before men; this is a second delight.—Mencius, Tsin Sin (pt. i., ch. xx.). Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with virtue.—Confucian An., Yang Ho (ch. xvii.). I am pleased with your intelligent virtue, not loudly proclaimed nor portrayed, without extravagance or changeableness, without consciousness of effort on your part, in accordance with the pattern of God.—She King, ii., Major Odes, Hwang I. Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.—Confucian An., Wei Ching (ch. xv.). Without recognizing the ordinances of Heaven it is impossible to be a superior man.—Confucian An., Yaou Yue (ch. iii.). Be tremblingly fearful, Yaou's Warning, Poem from Hwae Nan. The ways of God are not invariable; on the good doer he sends down all blessings, and on the evil doer he sends down all miseries.—Shoo King, Instructions of E (ch. iv.). In the way of superior man there are four things, not one of which have I as yet attained:—To serve my father as I would require my son to serve me; to serve my Prince as I would require my minister to serve me; to serve my elder brother as I would require my younger brother to serve me; to set the example in behaving to a friend as I would require him to behave to me.—Doctrine of the Mean (ch. xiii.). Virtue has no invariable model. A supreme regard to what is good gives the model of it. What is good has no invariable characteristic to be supremely regarded; it is found where there is conformity to the uniform decision of the mind.—Shoo King, Both Possessed Pure Virtue (ch. iii.). This King Wan She King, Decade of King Wan II. Man's nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards. There are none but have this tendency to good, just as all water flows downwards.—Mencius, Kaou Tsze (pt. i., ch. ii). Virtue is the root; wealth the result.—The Great Learning (ch. x.). Its sovereigns on their part were humbly careful not to lose the favor of God.—Shoo King, ii., Numerous Officers (ch. viii.). He who loves his parents will not dare to incur the risk of being hated by any man, and he who reveres his parents will not dare to incur the risk of being condemned by any man.—Hsiao King, Filial Piety (ch. ii.). Do not speak lightly; your words are your own. Do not say, This is of little importance; no one can hold my tongue for me; words are not to be cast away. Every word finds its answer; every good deed has its recompense.—She King, ii., Major Odes, the Yi. Looked at in friendly intercourse with superior men, you make your countenance harmonious and mild, anxious not to do anything wrong. Looked at in your chamber, you ought to be equally free from shame before the light which shines in. Do not say, This place is not public; no one can see me here: the approaches of spiritual beings cannot be calculated beforehand, but the more should they not be slighted.—She King, ii., Major Odes, the Yi. Let me not say that Heaven is high aloft above me. It ascends and descends about our doings; it daily inspects us wherever we are.—She King, i., Sacrificial Odes of Kau, Ode, King Kih. What future misery have they and ought they to endure who talk of what is not good in others?—Mencius, Le Low (pt. ii., ch. ix.). Above all, sternly keep yourself from drink.—Shoo King, Announcement about Drunkenness (ch. xiii.). Of ten thousand evils, lewdness is the head. Confucian Proverb. There are three thousand offenses against which the five punishments are directed, and there is not one of them greater than being unfilial.—The Hsiao King, The Five Punishments. Benevolence is man's mind and righteousness is man's path. How lamentable is it to neglect the path and not pursue it, to lose the mind and not know to seek it again.—Mencius, Kaou Tsze (pt. i., ch. xi.). Tsze Kung asked, saying, "What do you say of a man who is loved by all the people of his village?" The Master replied, "We may not for that accord our approval of him." "And what do you say of him who is hated by all the people of his village?" The Master said, "We may not for that conclude that he is bad. It is better than either of these cases that the good in the village love him and the bad hate him."—Confucian An., Tsze Loo (ch. xxiv.). Men must be decided on what they will not do, and then they are able to act with vigor in which they ought.—Mencius, Le Low (pt. ii., ch. viii.). Learn as if you could not reach your object and were always fearing also lest you should lose it.—Confucian An., T'ae Pih (ch. xvii.). King Wan looked on the people as he would on a man who was wounded, and he looked toward the right path as if he could not see it.—Mencius, Le Low (pt. ii., ch. xx.). To nourish the heart there is nothing better than to make the desires few.—Mencius, Tsin Sin (ch. xxxv.). When Heaven is about to confer a great office on any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering, and his sinews and bones with toil. It exposes his body to hunger, and subjects him to extreme poverty. It confounds his undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetencies.—Mencius, Kaou Tsze (pt. ii. ch. xv.). You should ever stand in awe of the punishment of Heaven.—Shoo King, ii.; Prince of Leu on Punishments. Great Heaven is intelligent and is with you in all your doings. Great Heaven is clear-seeing, and is with you in all your wanderings and indulgences.—She King, ii., Major Odes, the Pan. Ke Loo asked about serving the spirits of the dead. The Master said, "While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?" Ke Loo added, "I venture to ask about death." He was answered, "While you do not know life, how can you know about death?"—Confucian An., Seen Tsin (ch. xi.). For all affairs let there be adequate preparation. With preparation there will be no calamities.—Shoo King, Charge of Yue (ch. i.). As to what the superior man would feel to be a calamity, there is no such thing. He does nothing which is not according to propriety. If there should befall him one morning's calamity, the superior man does not account it a calamity.—Mencius, Le Low (pt. ii., ch. xxviii.). God is with you, have no doubts in your heart.—She King, Decade of King Wan II. Beware. What proceeds from you will return to you again.—Mencius, King Hwuy (pt. ii., ch. xii.). Show reverence for the weak.—Shoo King, Timber of the Tsze Tree (ch. iii.). When the year becomes cold, then we know how the pine and the cypress are the last to lose their leaves; i.e., men are not known save in times of adversity.—Confucian An., Tsze Han (ch. xxvii.). By nature men are nearly alike; by practice they get to be wide apart.—Confucian An., Yang Ho (ch. ii.). All are good at first, but few prove themselves to be so at the last.—She King, ii., Major Odes, the Tang. In serving his parents a son may remonstrate with them, but gently; when he sees that they do not incline to follow his advice he shows an increased degree of reverence, but does not abandon his purpose; and should they punish him he does not allow himself to murmur.—Confucian An., Le Yin (ch. xviii.). The Great God has conferred on the inferior people a moral sense, compliance with which would show their nature invariably right.—Shoo King, Announcement of T'ang (ch. ii.). Confucius said:—"There are three things which the superior man guards against. In youth when the physical powers are not yet settled, he guards against lust. When he is strong and the physical powers are full of vigor, he guards against quarrelsomeness. When he is old and the animal powers are decayed, he guards against covetousness."—Confucian An., Ke She (ch. vii.). He who stops short where stopping short is not allowable, will stop short in everything. He who behaves shabbily to those whom he ought to treat well, will behave shabbily to all.—Mencius, Tsin Sin (pt. i., ch. xliv.). Men are partial where they feel affection and love; partial where they despise and dislike; partial where they stand in awe and reverence; partial where they feel sorrow and compassion; partial where they are arrogant and rude. Thus it is that there are few men in the world who love and at the same time know the bad qualities of the object of their love, or who hate and yet know the excellences of the object of their hatred.—The Great Learning (ch. viii.). Heaven's plan in the production of mankind is this: that they who are first informed should instruct those who are later in being informed, and they who first apprehend principles should instruct those who are slower to do so. I am one of Heaven's people who first apprehended. I will take these principles and instruct this people in them.—Mencius, Wan Chang (pt. i., ch. vii.). From 'The Proverbial Philosophy of Confucius': copyrighted 1895, by Forster H. Jennings; G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers ufus Choate, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of advocates who have appeared at the English or American bar, was one of the most remarkable products of what is ordinarily considered hard, prosaic, matter-of-fact New England. He was a man quite apart from the ordinary race of lawyers or New-Englanders. He was as different from the typical New-Englander as was Hawthorne or Emerson. He had the imagination of a poet; and to his imagination, singular as it may seem, was largely due his success in handling questions of fact before juries. Rufus Choate He was born of good old English stock, in the southeastern part of the town of Ipswich, in the county of Essex and State of Massachusetts, on the first day of October, 1799. His ancestors had lived in Essex County from a very early date in its history and had filled important public positions. He was born and bred in sight of the sea, and his love for it stayed with him through life. One of his most eloquent addresses was on 'The Romance of the Sea.' And in his last illness at Halifax, his keenest pleasure was to watch the ships sailing in front of his windows. Dropping into sleep on one occasion, a few days before his death, he said to his attendant, "If a schooner or sloop goes by, don't disturb me; but if there is a square-rigged vessel, wake me." Mr. Choate had the ordinary education then given in New England to young men who had a love of learning. He began with the district school; from there he went to the academy at Hampton, New Hampshire; and later he entered Dartmouth College, where he graduated the first scholar in his class, in 1819. It is hard to find an accurate standard of comparison between the scholarship of that period and that of the present. No doubt, in our New England colleges of to-day there is a larger number of young men who have a considerable store of knowledge on many subjects of classical learning. But it is very doubtful if the graduates of Harvard and Yale of to-day are able to read the standard classic authors at the day of their graduation, with the ease and accuracy of Mr. Choate at the end of his active professional career in the year 1859. His continued devotion to the classics is shown by the following extract from his journal in the year 1844, while he was a member of Congress:— "1. Some professional work must be done every day.... Recent experiences suggest that I ought to be more familiar with evidence and Cowen's Phillips; therefore, daily for half an hour, I will thumb conscientiously. When I come home again, in the intervals of actual employment, my recent methods of reading, accompanying the reports with the composition of arguments upon the points adjudged, may be properly resumed. "2. In my Greek, Latin, and French readings—Odyssey, Thucydides, Tacitus, Juvenal, and some French orator or critic—I need make no change. So, too, Milton, Johnson, Burke—semper in manu—ut mos est. To my Greek I ought to add a page a day of Crosby's Grammar, and the practice of parsing every word in my few lines of Homer. On Sunday, the Greek Testament, and Septuagint, and French. This, and the oration of the Crown, which I will completely master, translate, annotate, and commit, will be enough in this kind. If not, I will add a translation of a sentence or two from Tacitus." A similar extract from his journal under the date of December 15th, 1844, reads:— "I begin a great work,—Thucydides, in Bloomfield's new edition,—with the intention of understanding a difficult and learning something from an instructive writer,—something for the more and more complicated, interior, inter-State American politics. "With Thucydides, I shall read Wachsmuth, with historical references and verifications. Schomann on the Assemblies of the Athenians, especially, I am to meditate, and master Danier's Horace, Ode 1, 11th to 14th line, translation and notes,—a pocket edition to be always in pocket." Throughout his life Mr. Choate kept up his classical studies. Few of the graduates of our leading colleges to-day carry from Commencement a training which makes the study of the Greek and Latin authors either easy or pleasant. Mr. Choate, like nearly every lawyer who has ever distinguished himself at the English bar, was a monument to the value of the study of the classics as a mere means of training for the active practical work of a lawyer. Mr. Choate studied law at Cambridge in the Harvard Law School. Nearly a year he spent at Washington in the office of Mr. Wirt, then Attorney-General of the United States. This was in 1821. Thereafter he was admitted to the bar, in September, 1823. He opened his office in Salem, but soon removed to Danvers, where he practiced for four or five years. During these earliest years of his professional life he had the fortune which many other brilliant men in his profession have experienced,—that of waiting and hoping. During his first two or three years, it is said, he was so despondent as to his chances of professional success that he seriously contemplated abandoning the law. In time he got his opportunity to show the stuff of which he was made. His first professional efforts were in petty cases before justices of the peace. Very soon however his great ability, with his untiring industry and his intense devotion to any cause in his hands, brought the reputation which he deserved, and reputation brought clients. In 1828 he removed to Salem. The Essex bar was one of great ability. Mr. Choate at once became a leader. Among his contemporaries at that bar was Caleb Cushing. Mr. Choate at first had many criminal cases. In the year 1830 he was, with Mr. Webster, one of the counsel for the prosecution in the celebrated White murder case. In 1830 he was elected to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives, at the age of thirty-one years. At once he laid out a course of study which was to fit him for the duties of his public life. An extract from it reads as follows:— "Nov. 4, 1830. "Facienda ad munus nuper impositum. "i. Pers. quals. [personal qualities], Memory, Daily Food, and Cowper dum ambulo. Voice, Manner, Exercitationes diurnæ. "2. Current politics in papers. 1. Cum Notulis, daily,—Geog., &c. 2. Annual Reg., Past Intelligencers, &c. "4. Civil History of U. States—in Pitkin and original sources. "5. Exam. of Pending Questions: Tariff, Pub. Lands, Indians, Nullifications. "6. Am. and Brit. Eloquence,—Writing, Practice." Then follow in his manuscript upwards of twenty pages of close writing, consisting of memoranda and statements, drawn from a multitude of sources, on the subjects laid down by him at the beginning as the ones to be investigated. In Congress he found himself in competition with many men of marked ability. Among the members of Congress then from Massachusetts were Mr. Webster in the Senate; and in the House, John Quincy Adams, Edward Everett, Nathan Appleton, George N. Briggs, and John Davis. In the Senate, from other States, were Peleg Sprague from Maine,—one of the ablest jurists this country has produced; Samuel Prentiss, Mr. Marcy, Mr. Dallas, Mr. Clayton, Mr. Clay, and Mr. Benton. In the House were James M. Wayne, Mr. McDuffie, Mr. Polk, Mr. Corwin, and Mr. Verplanck. Among men of this calibre Mr. Choate at once, with ease, took rank as one of the first. He made but two speeches during the session; but these gave him a position which he ever afterwards held among the most eloquent and convincing speakers in public life. In April 1833 Mr. Choate was re-elected to Congress. At this session he made a speech on the removal of the public deposits by President Jackson from the Bank of the United States. The following incident shows his power as an orator:— Benjamin Hardin was then a member from Kentucky, of the House of Representatives; and was himself intending to speak on the same side of the question with Mr. Choate. In such cases, Mr. Hardin's rule was to listen to no other speaker before speaking himself. Consequently when Mr. Choate began speaking, Mr. Hardin started to leave the House. He waited however for a moment to listen to a few sentences from Mr. Choate, and with this result, as told in his own words:—"The member from Massachusetts rose to speak, and in accordance with my custom I took my hat to leave, lingering a moment just to notice the tone of his voice and the manner of his speech. But that moment was fatal to my resolution. I became charmed by the music of his voice, and was captivated by the power of his eloquence, and found myself wholly unable to move until the last word of his beautiful speech had been uttered." At the close of this session Mr. Choate resigned his seat in Congress and went to Boston, there to follow the practice of his profession. At the Boston bar he met a remarkably brilliant group of men. There were Jeremiah Mason, whom Mr. Webster is said to have considered the strongest man that he ever met in any legal contest; Franklin Dexter; Chief Justice Shaw (then at the bar); Judges Wilde, Hoar, and Thomas, afterwards of the Massachusetts Supreme Court; Mr. Fletcher, Judge Benjamin R. Curtis, Sidney Bartlett, Richard H. Dana, William D. Sohier, Henry W. Paine, Edward D. Sohier, with others whose names are now almost forgotten. These men formed a bar the like of which has seldom if ever been assembled in any one jurisdiction. Here too Mr. Choate at once came to the front. With every talent which could make a man a great advocate,—with a marvelous memory, a keen logical intellect, a sound legal judgment,—he had now acquired a large professional experience and a very complete professional training. As has been seen, he had a thorough classical training,—that is, of the kind best fitted to his needs. His professional studies before beginning his professional practice had been the best then attainable; very possibly, for him, they were quite as good as can be had at any of the law schools of to-day. His range of reading and information was extremely wide. He had had several years of experience at Washington in Congress. And ever since leaving the law school his mere professional studies had been most severe. It is hard to see how any man could be better equipped for professional practice than Mr. Choate was at this time. His success at the Boston bar was phenomenal. He was in a contest with giants. Mr. Webster alone could be deemed to dispute with Mr. Choate the place of supremacy. The general verdict has been that for pure intellectual power Mr. Webster was the superior. But it may well be doubted whether as an all-round advocate Mr. Choate did not carry off the palm. The common idea of Mr. Choate has been that his marvelous eloquence was his great source of strength and success in his forensic contests. This is an error. Eloquent he undoubtedly was; few men have ever been more so. But unless in frontier communities, eloquence alone has never commanded great success at the bar—if indeed it has ever existed—without strong logical power and sound judgment. The power of convincing intelligent men always depends largely and mainly on soundness of judgment in the selection of positions. Especially is this so in the profession of the law. There have been, no doubt, many instances where men of eloquence have captivated juries by appeals to passion or prejudice. But in the vast majority of cases, success as an advocate cannot be had without sound judgment in the selection of positions, coupled with the power of clear logical statement. Mr. Choate was no exception to this rule. Mr. Henry W. Paine, one of the leaders of the Boston bar in Mr. Choate's time,—himself one of the most logical of men,—once said that he did not care to hear Mr. Choate address a jury, but to hear him argue a bill of exceptions before the full bench of the Supreme Court was one of the greatest intellectual treats. With the ordinary twelve men in a jury-box Mr. Choate was a wizard. His knowledge of human nature, his wide and deep sympathies, his imagination, his power of statement, with his rich musical voice and his wonderful fascination of manner, made him a charmer of men and a master in the great art of winning verdicts. So far as the writer is able to form an opinion, there has never been at the English or American bar a man who has been his equal in his sway over juries. Comparisons are often condemned, but they are at times useful. Comparing Mr. Choate with Mr. Webster, it must be conceded that Mr. Webster might at times carry a jury against Mr. Choate by his force of intellect and the tremendous power of his personal presence. Mr. O'Conor once said that he did not consider Mr. Webster an eloquent man. "Mr. Webster," he said, "was an intellectual giant. But he never impressed me as being an eloquent man." The general judgment is that Mr. Webster had eloquence of a very high order. But Mr. Choate was a magician. With any opponent of his time except Mr. Webster, he was irresistible before juries. Mr. Justice Catron of the United States Court is reported to have said of Mr. Choate, "I have heard the most eminent advocates, but he surpasses them all." His success came from a rare combination of eloquence, sound logical judgment, and great powers of personal fascination. In another respect the common opinion of Mr. Choate must be corrected. His great powers of persuasion and conviction undoubtedly gave him some victories which were not deserved by the mere merits of his cases. From this fact there went abroad the impression that he was a man without principle, and that his ethical standards were not high in his selection and conduct of cases. This impression is quite contrary to the judgment of the competent. The impression was due largely to his success in the celebrated defense of Tirrell. Tirrell was indicted for the murder of a woman named Bickford, with whom Tirrell had long associated, who was found dead in a house of ill-repute. At about the hour when the woman lost her life, either by her own hand or by that of Tirrell, the house caught fire. The cause of the fire was not proved. Tirrell had been in her company the preceding evening, and articles of clothing belonging to him were found in the morning in her room. Many circumstances seemed to indicate that the woman had been killed by Tirrell. He was also indicted for arson in setting fire to the house. In addition to other facts proved by the defense, it was shown by reputable witnesses that Tirrell had from his youth been subject to somnambulism; and one of the positions taken by Mr. Choate for the defense was that the killing, if done by Tirrell at all, was done by him while unconscious, in a condition of somnambulism. Tirrell was tried under both indictments and was acquitted on both. The indictment for murder was tried before Justices Wilde, Dewey, and Hubbard. The indictment for arson was tried before Chief Justice Shaw and Justices Wilde and Dewey. The foreman of the jury stated that the defense of somnambulism received no weight in the deliberations of the jury. The judgment of the profession has been that the verdicts were the only ones which could properly have been rendered on the evidence. In the arson case the charge to the jury was by Chief Justice Shaw, and was strongly in favor of the defense. No doubt the defense was extremely able and ingenious. But the criticisms against Mr. Choate for his conduct of those cases, in the opinion of those members of the profession best qualified to judge, have been held to be without good foundation. Lawyers—that is, reputable ones—do not manufacture evidence, nor are they the witnesses who testify to facts. The severe tests of cross-examination usually elicit the truth. No one ever charged Mr. Choate with manufacturing evidence. And no lawyer of good judgment, so far as the writer is aware, has ever charged him with practices which were not in keeping with the very highest professional standards. In the space here allotted, any attempt to give an adequate idea of Mr. Choate's professional and public work is quite out of the question. In addition to the conduct of an unusually large professional practice he did a large amount of literary work, mainly in the delivery of lectures, which at that time in New England were almost a part of the public system of education. Throughout his life he took an active part in politics. He attended the Whig convention at Baltimore in 1852, where General Scott received his nomination for the Presidency, and where Mr. Choate made one of the most eloquent speeches of his life in his effort to secure the nomination for Mr. Webster. Mr. Choate finally killed himself by overwork. Though a man of great physical strength and remarkable vitality, no constitution could stand the strain of his intense labors in the different lines of law, literature, and politics. His magnificent physique finally broke down. He died on July 13th, 1859, being not quite sixty years. His death was an important public event. In the public press, at many public meetings throughout the country, and by public men of the highest distinction, his death was treated as a public misfortune. In his day he rendered distinguished public services. He had the capacities and the interests which fitted him to be a great statesman. Had it not been for our system of short terms, and rotation in office, Mr. Choate would probably have remained in public life from the time of his entry into Congress, would have been a most valuable public servant, and would have left a great reputation as a statesman. As it was, he left, so far as now appears, only the ephemeral reputation of a great advocate. This scanty sketch can best be closed by a quotation from the address of Richard H. Dana at the meeting of the Boston bar held just after Mr. Choate's death. That extract will show the judgment of Mr. Choate which was held by the giants among whom he lived and of whom he was the leader:— "'The wine of life is drawn.' 'The golden bowl is broken.' The age of miracles has passed. The day of inspiration is over. The Great Conqueror, unseen and irresistible, has broken into our temple and has carried off the vessels of gold, the vessels of silver, the precious stones, the jewels, and the ivory; and like the priests of the temple of Jerusalem after the invasion from Babylon, we must content ourselves as we can with vessels of wood and of stone and of iron. "With such broken phrases as these, Mr. Chairman, perhaps not altogether just to the living, we endeavor to express the emotions natural to this hour of our bereavement. Talent, industry, eloquence, and learning, there are still, and always will be, at the bar of Boston. But if I say that the age of miracles has passed, that the day of inspiration is over,—if I cannot realize that in this place where we now are, the cloth of gold was spread, and a banquet set fit for the gods,—I know, sir, you will excuse it. Any one who has lived with him and now survives him, will excuse it;—any one who like the youth in Wordsworth's Ode,— '—by the vision splendid It will also tend to secure justice to Mr. Choate's memory, if there be here recorded the statement by Judge Benjamin R. Curtis of the judgment of the men of Mr. Choate's own profession, as to the moral standards by which Mr. Choate was governed in his practice. Judge Curtis said in his address at the same meeting of the Boston Bar:— "I desire, therefore, on this occasion and in this presence, to declare our appreciation of the injustice which would be done to this great and eloquent advocate by attributing to him any want of loyalty to truth, or any deference to wrong, because he employed all his great powers and attainments, and used to the utmost his consummate skill and eloquence, in exhibiting and enforcing the comparative merits of one side of the cases in which he acted. In doing so he but did his duty. If other people did theirs, the administration of justice was secured." All the citations are from 'Addresses and Orations of Rufus Choate': copyrighted 1878, by Little, Brown and Company Turn first now for a moment to the old English Puritans, the fathers of our fathers, of whom came, of whom were, planters of Ipswich, of Massachusetts, of New England,—of whom came, of whom were, our own Ward, Parker, and Saltonstall, and Wise, Norton, and Rogers, and Appleton, and Cobbet, and Winthrop,—and see whether they were likely to be the founders of a race of freemen or slaves. Remember then, the true, noblest, the least questioned, least questionable, praise of these men is this: that for a hundred years they were the sole depositaries of the sacred fire of liberty in England after it had gone out in every other bosom,—that they saved at its last gasp the English Constitution,—which the Tudors and the first two Stuarts were rapidly changing into just such a gloomy despotism as they saw in France and Spain,—and wrought into it every particle of freedom which it now possesses,—that when they first took their seats in the House of Commons, in the early part of the reign of Elizabeth, they found it the cringing and ready tool of the throne, and that they reanimated it, remodeled it, reasserted its privileges, restored it to its constitutional rank, drew back to it the old power of making laws, redressing wrongs, and imposing taxes, and thus again rebuilt and opened what an Englishman called "the chosen temple of liberty," an English House of Commons,—that they abridged the tremendous power of the crown and defined it,—and when at last Charles Stuart resorted to arms to restore the despotism they had partially overthrown, that they met him on a hundred fields of battle, and buried, after a sharp and long struggle, crown and mitre and the headless trunk of the king himself beneath the foundations of a civil and religious commonwealth. This praise all the historians of England—Whig and Tory, Protestant and Catholic, Hume, Hallam, Lingard, and all—award to the Puritans. By what causes this spirit of liberty had been breathed into the masculine, enthusiastic, austere, resolute character of this extraordinary body of men, in such intensity as to mark them off from all the rest of the people of England, I cannot here and now particularly consider. It is a thrilling and awful history of the Puritans in England, from their first emerging above the general level of Protestants, in the time of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., until they were driven by hundreds and thousands to these shores; but I must pass it over. It was just when the nobler and grander traits—the enthusiasm and piety and hardihood and energy—of Puritanism had attained the highest point of exaltation to which, in England, it ever mounted up, and the love of liberty had grown to be the great master-passion that fired and guided all the rest,—it was just then that our portion of its disciples, filled with the undiluted spirit, glowing with the intensest fervors of Protestantism and republicanism together, came hither, and in that elevated and holy and resolved frame began to build the civil and religious structures which you see around you. Trace now their story a little farther onward through the Colonial period to the War of Independence, to admire with me the providential agreement of circumstances by which that spirit of liberty which brought them hither was strengthened and reinforced; until at length, instructed by wisdom, tempered by virtue, and influenced by injuries, by anger and grief and conscious worth and the sense of violated right, it burst forth here and wrought the wonders of the Revolution. I have thought that if one had the power to place a youthful and forming people like the Northern colonists, in whom the love of freedom was already vehement and healthful, in a situation the most propitious for the growth and perfection of that sacred sentiment, he could hardly select a fairer field for so interesting an experiment than the actual condition of our fathers for the hundred and fifty years after their arrival, to the War of the Revolution. They had freedom enough to teach them its value and to refresh and elevate their spirits, wearied, not despondent, from the contentions and trials of England. They were just so far short of perfect freedom that instead of reposing for a moment in the mere fruition of what they had, they were kept emulous and eager for more, looking all the while up and aspiring to rise to a loftier height, to breathe a purer air, and bask in a brighter beam. Compared with the condition of England down to 1688,—compared with that of the larger part of the continent of Europe down to our Revolution,—theirs was a privileged and liberal condition. The necessaries of freedom, if I may say so,—its plainer food and homelier garments and humbler habitations,—were theirs. Its luxuries and refinements, its festivals, its lettered and social glory, its loftier port and prouder look and richer graces, were the growth of a later day; these came in with independence. Here was liberty enough to make them love it for itself, and to fill them with those lofty and kindred sentiments which are at once its fruit and its nutriment and safeguard in the soul of man. But their liberty was still incomplete, and it was constantly in danger from England; and these two circumstances had a powerful effect in increasing that love and confirming those sentiments. It was a condition precisely adapted to keep liberty, as a subject of thought and feeling and desire, every moment in mind. Every moment they were comparing what they had possessed with what they wanted and had a right to; they calculated by the rule of three, if a fractional part of freedom came to so much, what would express the power and value of the whole number! They were restive and impatient and ill at ease; a galling wakefulness possessed their faculties like a spell. Had they been wholly slaves, they had lain still and slept. Had they been wholly free, that eager hope, that fond desire, that longing after a great, distant, yet practicable good, would have given way to the placidity and luxury and carelessness of complete enjoyment; and that energy and wholesome agitation of mind would have gone down like an ebb-tide. As it was, the whole vast body of waters all over its surface, down to its sunless, utmost depths, was heaved and shaken and purified by a spirit that moved above it and through it and gave it no rest, though the moon waned and the winds were in their caves; they were like the disciples of the old and bitter philosophy of paganism, who had been initiated into one stage of the greater mysteries, and who had come to the door, closed, and written over with strange characters, which led up to another. They had tasted of truth, and they burned for a fuller draught; a partial revelation of that which shall be hereafter had dawned; and their hearts throbbed eager, yet not without apprehension, to look upon the glories of the perfect day. Some of the mystery of God, of Nature, of Man, of the Universe, had been unfolded; might they by prayer, by abstinence, by virtue, by retirement, by contemplation, entitle themselves to read another page in the clasped and awful volume? I hold it to have been a great thing, in the first place, that we had among us, at that awful moment when the public mind was meditating the question of submission to the tea tax, or resistance by arms, and at the more awful moment of the first appeal to arms,—that we had some among us who personally knew what war was. Washington, Putnam, Stark, Gates, Prescott, Montgomery, were soldiers already. So were hundreds of others of humbler rank, but not yet forgotten by the people whom they helped to save, who mustered to the camp of our first Revolutionary armies. These all had tasted a soldier's life. They had seen fire, they had felt the thrilling sensations, the quickened flow of blood to and from the heart, the mingled apprehension and hope, the hot haste, the burning thirst, the feverish rapture of battle, which he who has not felt is unconscious of one-half of the capacities and energies of his nature; which he who has felt, I am told, never forgets. They had slept in the woods on the withered leaves or the snow, and awoke to breakfast upon birch-bark and the tender tops of willow-trees. They had kept guard on the outposts on many a stormy night, knowing perfectly that the thicket half a pistol-shot off was full of French and Indian riflemen. I say it was something that we had such men among us. They helped discipline our raw first levies. They knew what an army is, and what it needs, and how to provide for it. They could take that young volunteer of sixteen by the hand, sent by an Ipswich mother, who after looking upon her son equipped for battle from which he might not return, Spartan-like, bid him go and behave like a man—and many, many such shouldered a musket for Lexington and Bunker Hill—and assure him from their own personal knowledge that after the first fire he never would know fear again, even that of the last onset. But the long and peculiar wars of New England had done more than to furnish a few such officers and soldiers as these. They had formed that public sentiment upon the subject of war which re-united all the armies, fought all the battles, and won all the glory of the Revolution. The truth is that war in some form or another had been, from the first, one of the usages, one of the habits, of colonial life. It had been felt from the first to be just as necessary as planting or reaping—to be as likely to break out every day and every night as a thunder-shower in summer, and to break out as suddenly. There have been nations who boasted that their rivers or mountains never saw the smoke of an enemy's camp. Here the war-whoop awoke the sleep of the cradle; it startled the dying man on his pillow; it summoned young and old from the meeting-house, from the burial, and from the bridal ceremony, to the strife of death. The consequence was that the steady, composed, and reflecting courage which belongs to all the English race grew into a leading characteristic of New England; and a public sentiment was formed, pervading young and old and both sexes, which declared it lawful, necessary, and honorable to risk life and to shed blood for a great cause,—for our family, for our fires, for our God, for our country, for our religion. In such a cause it declared that the voice of God himself commanded to the field. The courage of New England was the "courage of conscience." It did not rise to that insane and awful passion, the love of war for itself. It would not have hurried her sons to the Nile, or the foot of the Pyramids, or across the great raging sea of snows which rolled from Smolensko to Moscow, to set the stars of glory upon the glowing brow of ambition. But it was a courage which at Lexington, at Bunker Hill, at Bennington, and at Saratoga, had power to brace the spirit for the patriot's fight, and gloriously roll back the tide of menaced war from their homes, the soil of their birth, the graves of their fathers, and the everlasting hills of their freedom. Something such has, in all the past periods of our history, been one of the functions of the American bar. To vindicate the true interpretation of the charters of the colonies, to advise what forms of polity, what systems of jurisprudence, what degree and what mode of liberty these charters permitted,—to detect and expose that long succession of infringement which grew at last to the Stamp Act and Tea Tax, and compelled us to turn from broken charters to national independence,—to conduct the transcendent controversy which preceded the Revolution, that grand appeal to the reason of civilization,—this was the work of our first generation of lawyers: to construct the American constitutions: the higher praise of the second generation. I claim it in part for the sobriety and learning of the American bar; for the professional instinct towards the past; for the professional appreciation of order, forms, obedience, restraints; for the more than professional, the profound and wide intimacy with the history of all liberty, classical, mediæval, and above all, of English liberty,—I claim it in part for the American bar that, springing into existence by revolution,—revolution, which more than anything and all things lacerates and discomposes the popular mind,—justifying that revolution only on a strong principle of natural right, with not one single element or agent of monarchy or aristocracy on our soil or in our blood,—I claim it for the bar that the constitutions of America so nobly closed the series of our victories! These constitutions owe to the bar more than their terse and exact expression and systematic arrangements: they owe to it in part, too, their elements of permanence; their felicitous reconciliation of universal and intense liberty with forms to enshrine and regulations to restrain it; their Anglo-Saxon sobriety and gravity conveyed in the genuine idiom, suggestive of the grandest civil achievements of that unequaled race. To interpret these constitutions, to administer and maintain them, this is the office of our age of the profession. Herein have we somewhat wherein to glory; hereby we come into the class and share in the dignity of founders of States, of restorers of States, of preservers of States. I said and I repeat that while lawyers, and because we are lawyers, we are statesmen. We are by profession statesmen. And who may measure the value of this department of public duty? Doubtless in statesmanship there are many mansions, and large variety of conspicuous service. Doubtless to have wisely decided the question of war or peace,—to have adjusted by a skillful negotiation a thousand miles of unsettled boundary-line,—to have laid the corner-stone of some vast policy whereby the currency is corrected, the finances enriched, the measure of industrial fame filled,—are large achievements. And yet I do not know that I can point to one achievement of this department of American statesmanship which can take rank for its consequences of good above that single decision of the Supreme Court which adjudged that an act of legislature contrary to the Constitution is void, and that the judicial department is clothed with the power to ascertain the repugnancy and to pronounce the legal conclusion. That the framers of the Constitution intended this should be so is certain; but to have asserted it against the Congress and the Executive,—to have vindicated it by that easy yet adamantine demonstration than which the reasonings of the mathematics show nothing surer,—to have inscribed this vast truth of conservatism on the public mind, so that no demagogue, not in the last stage of intoxication, denies it,—this is an achievement of statesmanship of which a thousand years may not exhaust or reveal all the good. Sometimes it has seemed to me that to enable one to appreciate with accuracy, as a psychological speculation, the intrinsic and absolute volume and texture of that brain,—the real rate and measure of those abilities,—it was better not to see or hear him, unless you could see or hear him frequently, and in various modes of exhibition; for undoubtedly there was something in his countenance and bearing so expressive of command,—something even in his conversational language when saying "Parva summisse et modica temperate," so exquisitely plausible, embodying the likeness at least of a rich truth, the forms at least of a large generalization, in an epithet,—an antithesis,—a pointed phrase,—a broad and peremptory thesis,—and something in his grander forthputting, when roused by a great subject or occasion exciting his reason and touching his moral sentiments and his heart, so difficult to be resisted, approaching so near, going so far beyond, the higher style of man, that although it left you a very good witness of his power of influencing others, you were not in the best condition immediately to pronounce on the quality or the source of the influence. You saw the flash and heard the peal, and felt the admiration and fear; but from what region it was launched, and by what divinity, and from what Olympian seat, you could not certainly yet tell. To do that you must, if you saw him at all, see him many times; compare him with himself and with others; follow his dazzling career from his father's house; observe from what competitors he won those laurels; study his discourses,—study them by the side of those of other great men of this country and time, and of other countries and times, conspicuous in the same fields of mental achievement,—look through the crystal water of the style down to the golden sands of the thought; analyze and contrast intellectual power somewhat; consider what kind and what quantity of it has been held by students of mind needful in order to great eminence in the higher mathematics, or metaphysics, or reason of the law; what capacity to analyze, through and through, to the primordial elements of the truths of that science; yet what wisdom and sobriety, in order to control the wantonness and shun the absurdities of a mere scholastic logic, by systematizing ideas, and combining them, and repressing one by another, thus producing, not a collection of intense and conflicting paradoxes, but a code, scientifically coherent and practically useful,—consider what description and what quantity of mind have been held needful by students of mind in order to conspicuous eminence—long maintained—in statesmanship; that great practical science, that great philosophical art, whose ends are the existence, happiness, and honor of a nation; whose truths are to be drawn from the widest survey of man,—of social man,—of the particular race and particular community for which a government is to be made or kept, or a policy to be provided; "philosophy in action," demanding at once or affording place for the highest speculative genius and the most skillful conduct of men and of affairs; and finally consider what degree and kind of mental power has been found to be required in order to influence the reason of an audience and a nation by speech,—not magnetizing the mere nervous or emotional nature by an effort of that nature, but operating on reason by reason—a great reputation in forensic and deliberative eloquence, maintained and advancing for a lifetime,—it is thus that we come to be sure that his intellectual power was as real and as uniform as its very happiest particular display had been imposing and remarkable. strong soldier of the Cross and from good fighting stock was that John of Antioch who, among the people that were first of the earth to bear the name of Christian, was called Chrysostom—"mouth of gold." His father Secundus, who died about the time of Chrysostom's birth, was a military commander in Syria under Constantine and Constantius II. John was born at Antioch, A.D. 347, when the Eastern Empire and the City of Constantine were new. His young mother Arethusa, a Christian, then but twenty years of age, devoted herself to widowhood and the education of her son in the city of his birth. The youth's early years were passed under her careful guidance, and at the age of twenty he entered on the study of oratory and philosophy under the celebrated Libanius. In 369 he became a baptized Christian and reader in the house of Melitius the bishop. The unhappy reigns of Valens and Valentinian, when neo-paganism in the West and in the Gothic settlement in the East began to work the Empire's fall, saw John devoted to an ascetic life, after the example of the monks and hermits who sheltered in the mountains about the gay and queenly city of his birth. His mother's grief and loneliness brought him back from his cave to an energetic career as an outspoken preacher of God's Word and the eternal profit of good stout-hearted workaday well-doing. He made himself dear to the people of Antioch, for he had eloquence such as had been unknown to Greeks since Demosthenes, and he shrank not from labor and self-denial. So they called him "golden-mouth," as the Indians call their tried men "straight-tongues." On the death of Nectarius, the successor of Gregory of Nazianzenus, Theophilus of Alexandria and Arcadius the Emperor made him Metropolitan of Constantinople, A.D. 397. All before this time he was laying about him with good ear-smiting Greek at vice and luxury, of which there was abundance both in palace and in hovel; and his elevation to an Imperial neighborhood did not stay him. He cleared Byzantium of pagan shows, gathered the relics of the martyrs, and sent missionaries to preach to the Goths in their own speech. Not many years of this kind of leadership were allowed him. Arcadius, well disposed but indolent, was under the rule of a willful woman; and when Chrysostom turned his swayful voice against her pet vanities, the vexed Eudoxia intrigued his deposition. In 403 John went to exile in Bithynia, with the words "The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away" upon his lips. A great earthquake so frightened the Imperial City and family that with one outcry they called Chrysostom back. When the fear of the infirm earth had worn away, Eudoxia remembered her enmity and took it back to nurse. So one day when John had said in his sword-like invective that "Herodias was raging again," she showed less mercy than the Baptist had obtained; for under the plea that his restoration had been unwarranted, the Metropolitan was sent to a forced wandering in the wilds of outer provinces, from which there returned of him only the venerated relics of a martyr. Driven from spot to spot, sometimes in chains, always under the prod of guarding spears, one day of September, 407, he dragged himself to the tomb of the martyr Basiliscus at Comana in Pontus, and laid his soul in the hands of God. Thirty years afterward, Theodosius the Younger brought the body back to Constantinople. In person Chrysostom was small and spare. His life of rigorous fasting and toil made him still more slight and hollow-cheeked, but it is told that there was always a blaze of fire in the deep-set eyes. The work of Chrysostom was chiefly ecclesiastical oratory, in which no one of his own or later time surpassed him. First of the great Christian preachers after the Church came from the caves, he was not less able as a teacher. His letters, full of sweetness and firm honesty, his poetry, delicate and musical, and his philosophic essays, rich with the clear-cut jewels of dialectics, are worthy of his station in the first order of the Doctors of the Church. What I undertake is to prove (only make no commotion) that no one of those who are wronged is wronged by another, but experiences this injury at his own hands. But in order to make my argument plainer, let us first of all inquire what injustice is, and of what kind of things the material of it is wont to be composed; also what human virtue is, and what it is which ruins it; and further, what it is which seems to ruin it but really does not. For instance (for I must complete my argument by means of examples), each thing is subject to one evil which ruins it: iron to rust, wool to moth, flocks of sheep to wolves. The virtue of wine is injured when it ferments and turns sour; of honey when it loses its natural sweetness and is reduced to a bitter juice. Ears of corn are ruined by mildew and drought, the fruit and leaves and branches of vines by the mischievous host of locusts, other trees by the caterpillar, and irrational creatures by diseases of various kinds; and not to lengthen the list by going through all possible examples, our own flesh is subject to fevers and palsies and a crowd of other maladies. As then each one of these things is liable to that which ruins its virtue, let us now consider what it is which injures the human race, and what it is which ruins the virtue of a human being. Most men think that there are divers things which have this effect; for I must mention the erroneous opinions on the subject, and after confuting them, proceed to exhibit that which really does ruin our virtue, and to demonstrate clearly that no one could inflict this injury or bring this ruin upon us unless we betrayed ourselves. The multitude then, having erroneous opinions, imagine that there are many different things which ruin our virtue; some say it is poverty, others bodily disease, others loss of property, others calumny, others death, and they are perpetually bewailing and lamenting these things: and whilst they are commiserating the sufferers and shedding tears, they excitedly exclaim to one another, "What a calamity has befallen such and such a man! he has been deprived of all his fortune at a blow." Of another again one will say, "Such and such a man has been attacked by severe sickness and is despaired of by the physicians in attendance." Some bewail and lament the inmates of the prison, some those who have been expelled from their country and transported to the land of exile, others those who have been deprived of their freedom, others those who have been seized and made captives by enemies, others those who have been drowned, or burnt, or buried by the fall of a house, but no one mourns those who are living in wickedness; on the contrary, which is worse than all, they often congratulate them, a practice which is the cause of all manner of evils. Come then (only, as I exhorted you at the outset, do not make a commotion), let me prove that none of the things which have been mentioned injure the man who lives soberly, nor can ruin his virtue. For tell me, if a man has lost his all either at the hands of calumniators or of robbers, or has been stripped of his goods by knavish servants, what harm has the loss done to the virtue of the man? But if it seems well, let me rather indicate in the first place what is the virtue of a man, beginning by dealing with the subject in the case of existences of another kind, so as to make it more intelligible and plain to the majority of readers. What then is the virtue of a horse? is it to have a bridle studded with gold and girths to match, and a band of silken threads to fasten the housing, and clothes wrought in divers colors and gold tissue, and head-gear studded with jewels, and locks of hair plaited with gold cord? or is it to be swift and strong in its legs, and even in its paces, and to have hoofs suitable to a well-bred horse, and courage fitted for long journeys and warfare, and to be able to behave with calmness in the battle-field, and if a rout takes place, to save its rider? Is it not manifest that these are the things which constitute the virtue of the horse, not the others? Again, what should you say was the virtue of asses and mules? is it not the power of carrying burdens with contentment, and accomplishing journeys with ease, and having hoofs like rock? Shall we say that their outside trappings contribute anything to their own proper virtue? By no means. And what kind of vine shall we admire? one which abounds in leaves and branches, or one which is laden with fruit? Or what kind of virtue do we predicate of an olive? is it to have large boughs and great luxuriance of leaves, or to exhibit an abundance of its proper fruit dispersed over all parts of the tree? Well, let us act in the same way in the case of human beings also: let us determine what is the virtue of man, and let us regard that alone as an injury, which is destructive to it. What then is the virtue of man? Not riches, that thou shouldst fear poverty; nor health of body, that thou shouldst dread sickness; nor the opinion of the public, that thou shouldst view an evil reputation with alarm, nor life simply for its own sake, that death should be terrible to thee; nor liberty that thou shouldst avoid servitude: but carefulness in holding true doctrine, and rectitude in life. Of these things not even the devil himself will be able to rob a man, if he who possesses them guards them with the needful carefulness, and that most malicious and ferocious demon is aware of this. Thus in no case will any one be able to injure a man who does not choose to injure himself; but if a man is not willing to be temperate, and to aid himself from his own resources, no one will ever be able to profit him. Therefore also that wonderful history of the Holy Scriptures, as in some lofty, large, and broad picture, has portrayed the lives of the men of old time, extending the narrative from Adam to the coming of Christ: and it exhibits to you both those who are vanquished and those who are crowned with victory in the contest, in order that it may instruct you by means of all examples that no one will be able to injure one who is not injured by himself, even if all the world were to kindle a fierce war against him. For it is not stress of circumstances, nor variation of seasons, nor insults of men in power, nor intrigues besetting thee like snow-storms, nor a crowd of calamities, nor a promiscuous collection of all the ills to which mankind is subject, which can disturb even slightly the man who is brave and temperate and watchful; just as on the contrary the indolent and supine man who is his own betrayer cannot be made better, even with the aid of innumerable ministrations. Copyrighted by the Christian Literature Company, New York. To my Lady, the most reverend and divinely favored Deaconess Olympias, I John, Bishop, send greeting in the Lord: Come now, let me relieve the wound of thy despondency, and disperse the thoughts which gather this cloud of care around thee. For what is it which upsets thy mind, and why art thou sorrowful and dejected? Is it because of the fierce black storm which has overtaken the Church, enveloping all things in darkness as of a night without a moon, and is growing to a head every day, travailing to bring forth disastrous shipwrecks, and increasing the ruin of the world? I know all this as well as you; none shall gainsay it, and if you like I will form an image of the things now taking place so as to present the tragedy yet more distinctly to thee. We behold a sea upheaved from the very lowest depths, some sailors floating dead upon the waves, others engulfed by them, the planks of the ships breaking up, the sails torn to tatters, the masts sprung, the oars dashed out of the sailors' hands, the pilots seated on the deck, clasping their knees with their hands instead of grasping the rudder, bewailing the hopelessness of their situation with sharp cries and bitter lamentations, neither sky nor sea clearly visible, but all one deep and impenetrable darkness, so that no one can see his neighbor; whilst mighty is the roaring of the billows, and monsters of the sea attack the crews on every side. But how much further shall I pursue the unattainable? for whatever image of our present evils I may seek, speech shrinks baffled from the attempt. Nevertheless, even when I look at these calamities I do not abandon the hope of better things, considering as I do who the Pilot is in all this—not one who gets the better of the storm by his art, but calms the raging waters by his rod. But if he does not effect this at the outset and speedily, such is his custom—he does not at the beginning put down these terrible evils; but when they have increased and come to extremities, and most persons are reduced to despair, then he works wondrously and beyond all expectation, thus manifesting his own power and training the patience of those who undergo these calamities. Do not therefore be cast down. For there is only one thing, Olympias, which is really terrible, only one real trial, and that is sin; and I have never ceased continually harping upon this theme: but as for all other things, plots, enmities, frauds, calumnies, insults, accusations, confiscation, exile, the keen sword of the enemy, the peril of the deep, warfare of the whole world, or anything else you like to name, they are but idle tales. For whatever the nature of these things may be, they are transitory and perishable, and operate in a mortal body without doing any injury to the vigilant soul. Therefore the blessed Paul, desiring to prove the insignificance both of the pleasures and sorrows relating to this life, declared the whole truth in one sentence when he said, "For the things which are seen are temporal." Why then dost thou fear temporal things which pass away like the stream of a river? For such is the nature of present things, whether they be pleasant or painful. And another prophet compared all human prosperity not to grass, but to another material even more flimsy, describing the whole of it "as the flower of grass." For he did not single out any one part of it, as wealth alone, or luxury alone, or power, or honor; but having comprised all the things which are esteemed splendid amongst men under the one designation of glory, he said, "All the glory of man is as the flower of grass." Nevertheless, you will say, adversity is a terrible thing and grievous to be borne. Yet look at it again compared with another image, and then also learn to despise it. For the railing, and insults, and reproaches, and gibes, inflicted by enemies and their plots, are compared to a worn-out garment and moth-eaten wool, when God says, "Fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid of their revilings, for they shall wax old as doth a garment, and like moth-eaten wool so shall they be consumed." Therefore let none of these things which are happening trouble thee; but ceasing to invoke the aid of this or that person, and to run after shadows (for such are human alliances), do thou persistently call upon Jesus whom thou servest, merely to bow his head and in a moment of time all these evils will be dissolved. But if thou hast already called upon him, and yet they have not been dissolved, such is the manner of God's dealing (for I will resume my former argument); he does not put down evils at the outset, but when they have grown to a head, when scarcely any form of the enemy's malice remains ungratified, then he suddenly converts all things to a state of tranquillity and conducts them to an unexpected settlement. For he is not only able to turn as many things as we expect and hope, to good, but many more, yea infinitely more. Wherefore also Paul saith, "Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think." Could he not, for example, have prevented the Three Children at the outset from falling into trial? But he did not choose to do this, thereby conferring great pain upon them. Therefore he suffered them to be delivered into the hands of barbarians, and the furnace to be heated to an immeasurable height and the wrath of the king to blaze even more fiercely than the furnace, and hands and feet to be bound with great severity, and they themselves to be cast into the fire; and then, when all they who beheld despaired of their rescue, suddenly and beyond all hope the wonder-working power of God, the supreme artificer, was displayed, and shone forth with exceeding splendor. For the fire was bound and the bondmen were released; and the furnace became a temple of prayer, a place of fountains and dew, of higher dignity than a royal court, and the very hairs of their head prevailed over that all-devouring element which gets the better even of iron and stone, and masters every kind of substance. And a solemn song of universal praise was instituted there by these holy men, inviting every kind of created thing to join in the wondrous melody: and they uttered hymns of thanksgiving to God for that they had been bound, and also burnt, as far at least as the malice of their enemies had power; that they had been exiles from their country, captives deprived of their liberty, wandering outcasts from city and home, sojourners in a strange and barbarous land: for all this was the outpouring of a grateful heart. And when the malicious devices of their enemies were perfected (for what further could they attempt after their death?) and the labors of the heroes were completed, and the garland of victory was woven, and their rewards were prepared, and nothing more was wanting for their renown, then at last their calamities were brought to an end, and he who caused the furnace to be kindled, and delivered them over to that great punishment, became himself the panegyrist of those holy heroes and the herald of God's marvelous deed, and everywhere throughout the world issued letters full of reverent praise, recording what had taken place, and becoming the faithful herald of the miracles wrought by the wonder-working God. For inasmuch as he had been an enemy and adversary, what he wrote was above suspicion even in the opinion of enemies. Dost thou see the abundance of resource belonging to God? his extraordinary power, his loving-kindness and care? Be not therefore dismayed or troubled, but continue to give thanks to God for all things, praising and invoking him; beseeching and supplicating; even if countless tumults and troubles come upon thee, even if tempests are stirred up before thine eyes, let none of these things disturb thee. For our Master is not baffled by the difficulty, even if all things are reduced to the extremity of ruin. For it is possible for him to raise those who have fallen, to convert those who are in error, to set straight those who have been ensnared, to release those who have been laden with countless sins, and make them righteous, to quicken those who are dead, to restore lustre to decayed things, and freshness to those who have waxen old. For if he makes things which are not to come into being, and bestows existence on things which are nowhere by any means manifest, how much more will he rectify things which already exist! Copyrighted by the Christian Literature Company, New York. Knowing these things, let us take heed to our life: and let us not be earnest as to the goods that perish; neither as to the glory that goeth out; nor as to that body which groweth old; nor as to that beauty which is fading; nor as to that pleasure which is fleeting: but let us expend all our care about the soul, and let us provide for the welfare of this in every way. For to cure the body when diseased is not an easy matter to every one; but to cure a sick soul is easy to all: and the sickness of the body requires medicines, as well as money, for its healing; but the healing of the soul is a thing easy to procure, and devoid of expense. And the nature of the flesh is with much labor delivered from those wounds which are troublesome; for very often the knife must be applied, and medicines that are bitter; but with respect to the soul there is nothing of this kind. It suffices only to exercise the will and the desire, and all things are accomplished. And this hath been the work of God's providence. For inasmuch as from bodily sickness no great injury could arise (for though we were not diseased, yet death would in any case come, and destroy and dissolve the body); but everything depends upon the health of our souls; this being by far the more precious and necessary, he hath made the medicining of it easy, and void of expense or pain. What excuse therefore or what pardon shall we obtain, if when the body is sick, and money must be expended on its behalf, and physicians called in, and much anguish endured, we make this so much a matter of our care (though what might result from that sickness could be no great injury to us), and yet treat the soul with neglect? And this, when we are neither called upon to pay down money, nor to give others any trouble, nor to sustain any sufferings; but without any of all these things, by only choosing and willing, have it in our power to accomplish the entire amendment of it: and knowing assuredly that if we fail to do this, we shall sustain the extreme sentence, and punishments, and penalties, which are inexorable! For tell me, if any one promised to teach thee the healing art in a short space of time, without money or labor, wouldst thou not think him a benefactor? Wouldst thou not submit both to do and to suffer all things, whatsoever he who promised these things commanded? Behold now, it is permitted thee without labor to find a medicine for wounds, not of the body, but of the soul, and to restore it to a state of health without any suffering! Let us not be indifferent to the matter! For pray what is the pain of laying aside anger against one who hath aggrieved thee? It is a pain indeed to remember injuries, and not to be reconciled! What labor is it to pray, and to ask for a thousand good things from God, who is ready to give? What labor is it, not to speak evil of any one? What difficulty is there in being delivered from envy and ill-will? What trouble is it to love one's neighbor? What suffering is it not to utter shameful words, nor to revile, nor to insult another? What fatigue is it not to swear? for again I return to this same admonition. The labor of swearing is indeed exceedingly great. Oftentimes, whilst under the influence of anger or wrath, we have sworn, perhaps, that we would never be reconciled to those who have injured us. I am now for the sixth day admonishing you in respect of this precept. Henceforth I am desirous to take leave of you, meaning to abstain from the subject, that ye may be on your guard. There will no longer be any excuse or allowance for you; for of right, indeed, if nothing had been said on this matter, it ought to have been amended of yourselves, for it is not a thing of an intricate nature, or that requires great preparation. But since ye have enjoyed the advantage of so much admonition and counsel, what excuse will ye have to offer, when ye stand accused before that dread tribunal and are required to give account of this transgression? It is impossible to invent any excuse; but of necessity you must either go hence amended, or if you have not amended, be punished, and abide the extremest penalty! Thinking therefore upon all these things, and departing hence with much anxiety about them, exhort ye one another, that the things spoken of during so many days may be kept with all watchfulness in your minds; so that whilst we are silent, ye instructing, edifying, exhorting one another, may exhibit great improvement: and having fulfilled all the other precepts may enjoy eternal crowns; which God grant we may all obtain through the grace and loving-kindness of our Lord Jesus Christ. Copyrighted by the Christian Literature Company, New York. he outward life, the political career, of Marcus Tullius Cicero, is to nearly all students of history a tragic and pathetic story. He seems peculiarly unfitted to the people and the time in which his lot was cast. His enlightened love for the traditions of the past, his passionate sentiment of patriotism, his forceful eloquence as a debater in the Senate or as an orator in the Forum,—these qualities of a Burke or a Webster stand out violently dissevered from the lurid history of his time. This humane scholarly life was flung into the midst of the wildest century in all Rome's grim annals; the hundred years of civic turmoil and bloodshed, from the elder Gracchus's murder to the death of Cleopatra. And yet such was the marvelous activity, the all-sided productiveness, of the Ciceronian intellect, that perhaps no human mind has ever so fully exploited all its powers. Moreover, in each intellectual field which he entered, the chances of time have removed nearly every Roman rival, leaving us no choice save to accept Cicero's guidance. There was many another orator, and history of eloquence. There were other practical treatises on rhetoric. Many a notable correspondence was actually preserved and published, though now lost. Even his free transcriptions from Greek philosophical treatises—hastily conned and perhaps imperfectly understood—have acquired, through the disappearance of the Greek scrolls themselves, an ill-deserved authority as to the tenets of the Epicurean and other schools. Before and above all else, Cicero was a pleader. Out of that activity grew his ill-starred political activity, while his other literary tastes were essentially but a solace in times of enforced retirement. With the discussion of his oratory, therefore, we may best combine a rapid outline of his life. By their common birthplace, Arpinum, and by a slight tie of kinship, Cicero was associated with Marius; and he began life, like Disraeli, with radical sympathies. He was the elder son of a wealthy Roman citizen, but no ancestor had ennobled the family by attaining curule office. After a most thorough course of training in Latin and Greek, Cicero began to "practice law." The pleader in ancient Rome was supposed to receive no fee, and even more than with us, found his profession the natural stepping-stone to political honors. At the age of twenty-six, Cicero (in 80 B.C.) defended his first important client in a criminal case. In the closing days of the Sullan proscriptions, young Roscius, of Ameria in Umbria, was charged with murdering his own father in Rome. A pair of Roscius's kinsmen were probably the real culprits, and had arranged with Chrysogonus, a wealthy freedman and favorite of the Dictator, to insert the dead man's name among the outlawed victims and to divide the confiscated estate. The son was persecuted because he resisted this second outrage. Cicero says he is himself protected by his obscurity, though no other advocate has dared to plead for the unlucky youth. In our present text there are some audacious words aimed at Sulla's own measures: they were probably sharpened in a later revision. The case was won, against general expectation. Cicero may have played the hero that day: certainly the brief remainder of Sulla's life was spent by the young democratic pleader traveling in the East,—"for his health," as Plutarch adds, truly enough. At this time his style was chastened and his manner moderated by the teachers of Athens, and especially by Molo in Rhodes. Cicero's quæstorship was passed in Sicily, 75-4 B.C. Here he knit close friendships with many Greek provincials, and did a creditable piece of archæological work by rediscovering Archimedes's tomb. His impeachment of Verres for misgovernment in Sicily was in 70 B.C. This time the orator runs a less desperate risk. Since Sulla's death the old constitution has languidly revived. Speech was comparatively free and safe. The "knights" or wealthy middle class,—Cicero's own,—deprived by Sulla of the right to sit as the jurors in impeachment trials like Verres's, partially regain the privilege in this very year. The overwhelming mass of evidence made Verres flee into exile, and Hortensius, till then leader of the Roman bar, threw up the case in despair. Nevertheless Cicero published the stately series of orations he had prepared. They form the most vivid picture, and the deadliest indictments ever drawn, of Roman provincial government,—and of a ruthless art-collector. Cicero instantly became the foremost among lawyers. Moreover, this success made Cicero a leader in the time of reaction after Sulla, and hastened his elevation to posts where only men of sterner nature could be fully and permanently successful. Pompey, born in the same year, was at this time leading the revolt against Sulla's measures. The attachment now formed, the warmer hearted Cicero never wholly threw off. The young general's later foreign victories are nowhere so generously set forth as in Cicero's too-rhetorical plea "for the Manilian Law," in 66 B.C. Pompey was then wintering in the East, after sweeping piracy in a single summer from the Mediterranean. This plea gave him the larger command against Mithridates. Despite the most extravagant laudation, however, Pompey remains, here as elsewhere, one of those large but vague and misty figures that stalk across the stage of history without ever once turning upon us a fully human face. Far more distinct than he, there looms above him the splendid triumphal pageant of Roman imperialism itself. Cicero's unrivaled eloquence won him not only a golden shower of gifts and legacies, but also the prætorship and consulship at the earliest legal age. Perhaps some of the old nobles foresaw and prudently avoided the Catilinarian storm of 63 B.C. The common dangers of that year, and the pride of assured position, may have hastened the full transfer of Cicero's allegiance to the old senatorial faction. Tiberius Gracchus, boldly praised in January, has become for Cicero a notorious demagogue; his slayers instead are the undoubted patriots, in the famous harangues of November. These latter, by the way, were certainly under the file three years afterward,—and it is not likely that we read any Ciceronian speech just as it was delivered. If there be any thread of consistency in Cicero's public career, it must be sought in his long but vain hope to unite the nobility and the equites, in order to resist the growing proletariat. The eager vanity with which Cicero seized the proud title "Father of the fatherland" is truly pathetic. The summary execution of the traitors may have been prompted by that physical timidity so often associated with the scholarly temperament. Whether needless or not, the act returned to plague him. The happiest effort of the orator in his consular year was the famous plea for Murena. This consul-elect for 62 was a successful soldier. Catiline must be met in the spring "in the jaws of Etruria." Cicero's dearest friend, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, a defeated candidate, accused Murena of bribery. The conditions of Roman politics, the character of Sulpicius, the tone of Cicero himself, bid us adjudge Murena probably guilty. Cicero had supported Sulpicius, but now feels it is no time to "go behind the returns," or to replace a bold soldier by a scholarly lawyer. To win his case Cicero must heap ridicule upon his own profession in his friend's person, and upon Stoic philosophy, represented by Cato, Sulpicius's chief advocate. This he did so successfully that Cato himself exclaimed with a grim smile, "What a jester our consul is!" Cicero won his case—and kept his friends. This speech is cited sixteen times by Quintilian, and is a model of forensic ingenuity, wit, and grace. Its patriotism may be plausibly defended, but hardly its moral standards. The next year produced the famous and successful defense of Cluentius,—probably guilty of poisoning,—and also the most delightful of all Cicero's speeches, the oration for the poet Archias. Whether the old Greek's claim to Roman citizenship was beyond cavil we neither know nor greatly care. The legal argument is suspiciously brief. The praise of literature and the scholarly life, however, has re-echoed ever since, and still reaches all hearts. Brother Quintus, sitting in judgment as prætor, is pleasantly greeted. This is the culmination in Cicero's career of success. Some boastful words uttered in these days make us doubt if he remembered Solon's and Sophocles's maxim, "Count no life happy before its close." The fast-growing power of Cæsar presently made the two successful generals Pompey and Crassus his political tools. Cicero refused to enter, on similar conditions, the cabal later known as the "First Triumvirate." Cæsar, about to depart for his long absence in Gaul, might well regard the patriotic and impulsive orator as the most serious source of possible opposition in his absence. Marcus refused, himself, to go along to Gaul a-soldiering, though Brother Quintus accepted a commission and served creditably. At last, reluctantly, Cæsar suffered Cicero's personal enemy Clodius to bring forward a decree outlawing "those who had put Roman citizens to death without trial" (March, 58 B.C.). Cicero meekly withdrew from Rome, was condemned by name in absence, and his town house and villas pillaged. As to the cowardice of this hasty retreat, none need use severer words than did the exile himself. It is the decisive event in his career. His uninterrupted success was ended. His pride could never recover fully from the hurt. Worst of all, he could never again pose, even before his own eyes, as the fearless hero-patriot. In short, Cæsar, the consummate master of action and of men, had humanely but decisively crippled the erratic yet patriotic rhetorician. In little more than a year the bad conduct of Clodius, the personal good-will of the "triumvirs," and the whirligig of politics, brought round Cicero's return from Greece. His wings were however effectively clipped. After a brief and slight flutter of independence, he made full, even abject, submission to the dominant Cæsarian faction. This was in 56 B.C. The next five years, inglorious politically, were however full of activity in legal oratory and other literary work. In his eloquent defense of Cælius Rufus, charged with an attempt to poison Clodia, Cicero perforce whitewashes, or at least paints in far milder colors than of old, Catiline, Cælius's lifelong friend! A still less pleasing feature is the abusive attack on the famous and beautiful Clodia, probably the "Lesbia" of Catullus. (The unhappy young poet seems to have preceded Cælius in the fickle matron's favor.) The events of the year 52 well illustrate the unfitness of Cicero for politics in such an age. Rome was full of street brawls, which Pompey could not check. The orator's old enemy Clodius, at the head of his bravos, was slain by a fellow ruffian Milo in January. At Milo's trial in April Cicero defended him, or attempted to do so. A court-room encircled by a yelling mob and guarded by Pompey's legions caused him to break down altogether. As afterward written out at leisure, the speech is a masterpiece of special pleading. The exiled Milo's criticism on it is well known: "I'm glad you never delivered it: I should not now be enjoying the mullets of Marseilles." The year 51-50 Cicero spent, most unwillingly, as proconsular governor in far-off Cilicia. Though really humane and relatively honest, he accumulated in these few months a handsome sum in "gifts" from provincials and other perquisites. Even Cicero was a Roman. Meantime the civil war had all but broken out at home. Cicero hesitated long, and the correspondence with Atticus contains exhaustive analyses of his motives and temptations. His naïve selfishness and vanity at times in these letters seem even like self-caricature. Yet through it all glimmers a vein of real though bewildered patriotism. Still the craving for a triumph—he had fought some savage mountain clans in Asia Minor!—was hardly less dominant. Repairing late and with many misgivings to Pompey's camp in Epirus, Cicero seems to have been there a "not unfeared, half-welcome" and critical guest. Illness is his excuse for absence from the decisive battle. He himself tells us little of these days. As Plutarch relates the tale, after Pompey's flight to Egypt Cicero refused the supreme command, and was thereupon threatened with death by young Gneius Pompey; but his life was saved by Cato. One thing at least is undisputed. The last man to decide for Pompey's cause, he was the first to hurry back to Italy and crave Cæsar's grace! For many months he waited in ignoble retirement, fearing the success of his deserted comrades even more than Cæsar's victory. It is this action that gives the coup de grace to Cicero's character as a hero. With whatever misgivings, he had chosen his side. Whatever disturbing threats of violent revenge after victory he heard in Pompey's camp, he awaited the decisive battle. Then there remained, for any brave man, only constancy in defeat—or a fall upon his sword. Throughout Cæsar's brief reign,—or long dictatorship,—from 48 to 44, Cicero is the most stately and the most obsequious of courtiers. For him who would plead for clemency, or return thanks for mercy accorded, at a despot's footstool, there are no more graceful models than the 'Pro Ligario' and the 'Pro Marcello.' Cæsar himself realized, and wittily remarked, how irksome and hateful such a part must be to the older, vainer, more self-conscious man of the twain. Midway in this period Cicero divorced his wife after thirty years of wedlock, seemingly from some dissatisfaction over her financial management, and soon after married a wealthy young ward. This is the least pleasing chapter of his private life, but perhaps the mortification and suffering it entailed were a sufficient penalty. His only daughter Tullia's death in 45 B.C. nearly broke the father's heart. Whatever the reason, Cicero was certainly not in the secret of Cæsar's assassination. Twice in letters to members of the conspiracy in later months he begins: "How I wish you had invited me to your glorious banquet on the Ides of March." "There would have been no remnants," he once adds. That is, Antony would not have been left alive. We have now reached the last two years—perhaps the most creditable time—in Cicero's eventful life. This period runs from March 15th, 44 B.C., to December 7th, 43 B.C. It was one long struggle, first covert, then open, between Antony and the slayers of Cæsar. Cicero's energy and eloquence soon made him the foremost voice in the Senate once more. For the first time since his exile, he is now speaking out courageously his own real sentiments. His public action is in harmony with his own convictions. The cause was not hopeless by any means, so far as the destruction of Antony would have been a final triumph. Indeed, that wild career seemed near its end, when Octavian's duplicity again threw the game into his rival's reckless hands. However, few students of history imagine that any effective restoration of senatorial government was possible. The peculiar pathos of Cicero's end, patriot as he was, is this: it removed one of the last great obstacles to the only stable and peaceful rule Rome could receive—the imperial throne of Augustus. This last period is however among the most creditable, perhaps the most heroic, in Cicero's career. Its chief memorials are the fourteen extant orations against Antony. The comparative sincerity of these 'Philippics,' and the lack of private letters for much of this time, make them important historical documents. The only one which ranks among his greatest productions—perhaps the classic masterpiece of invective—is the 'Second Philippic.' This was never delivered at all, but published as a pamphlet. This unquestioned fact throws a curious light on passages like—"He is agitated, he perspires, he turns pale!" describing Antony at the (imaginary) delivery of the oration. The details of the behavior of Catiline and others may be hardly more authentic. The 'Ninth Philippic' is a heartfelt funeral eulogy on that same Sulpicius whom he had ridiculed in the 'Pro Murena.' "The milestones into headstones turn, A fragment from one of Livy's lost books says, "Cicero bore with becoming spirit none of the ills of life save death itself." He indeed perished not only bravely but generously, dissuading his devoted slaves from useless resistance, and extending his neck to Antony's assassins. Verres lived to exult at the news, and then shared his enemy's fate, rather than give up his Greek vases to Antony! Nearly every Roman, save Nero, dies well. Upon Cicero's political career our judgment is already indicated. He was always a patriot at heart, though often a bewildered one. His vanity, and yet more his physical cowardice, caused some grievous blots upon the record. His last days, and death, may atone for all—save one. The precipitate desertion of the Pompeians is not to be condoned. The best English life of Cicero is by Forsyth; but quaint, dogged, prejudiced old Middleton should not be forgotten. Plutarch's Cicero "needs no bush." Cicero's oratory was splendidly effective upon his emotional Italian hearers. It would not be so patiently accepted by any Teutonic folk. His very copiousness, however, makes him as a rule wonderfully clear and easy reading. Quintilian well says: "From Demosthenes's periods not a word can be spared, to Cicero's not one could be added." Despite the rout of Verres and of Catiline, the merciless dissection of Clodia, and the statelier thunders of the 'Philippics,' Cicero was most successful and happiest when "defending the interests of his friends." Perhaps the greatest success against justice was the 'Pro Cluentio,' which throws so lurid a light on ante-Borgian Italian criminology. This speech is especially recommended by Niebuhr to young philologues as a nut worthy of the strongest teeth. There is a helpful edition by Ramsay, but Hertland's 'Murena' will be a pleasanter variation for students wearying of the beaten track followed by the school editions. Both the failure of the 'Pro Milone' and the world-wide success of the 'Pro Archia' bid us repeat the vain wish, that this humane and essentially modern nature might have fallen on a gentler age. Regarding his whole political life as an uncongenial rôle forced on him by fate, we return devout thanks for fifty-eight orations, nearly all in revised and finished literary form! Fragments of seventeen, and titles of still thirty more, yet remain. From all his rivals, predecessors, pupils, not one authentic speech survives. The best complete edition of the orations with English notes is by George Long, in the Bibliotheca Classica. The 'Philippics' alone are better edited by J.R. King in the Clarendon Press series. School editions of select speeches are superabundant. They regularly include the four Catilinarians, the Manilian, and the pleas before the dictator, sometimes a selection from the 'Philippics' or Verrine orations. There is no masterly translation comparable with the fine work done by Kennedy for Demosthenes. The Bohn version is respectable in quality. Among Cicero's numerous works on rhetoric the chief is the 'De Oratore.' Actually composed in 55 B.C., it is a dialogue, the scene set in 91 B.C., the characters being the chief Roman orators of that day. L. Crassus, who plays the host gracefully at his Tusculan country-seat, is also the chief speaker. These men were all known to Cicero in his boyhood, but most of them perished soon after in the Marian proscriptions. Of real character-drawing there is little, and all alike speak in graceful Ciceronian periods. The exposition of the technical parts of rhetoric goes on in leisurely wise, with copious illustrations and digressions. There is much pleasant repetition of commonplaces. Wilkins's edition of the 'De Oratore' is a good but not an ideal one. The introductions are most helpful. Countless discussions on etymology, etc., in the notes, should be relegated to the dictionaries. Instead, we crave adequate cross-references to passages in this and other works. The notes seem to be written too largely piecemeal, each with the single passage in mind. In Cicero's 'Brutus,' written in 46 B.C., Cicero, Brutus, and Atticus carry on the conversation, but it is mostly a monologue of Cicero and a historical sketch of Roman oratory. The affected modesty of the autobiographic parts is diverting. Brutus was the chief exponent of a terse, simple, direct, oratory,—far nearer, we judge, to English taste than the Ciceronian; and the opposition between them already appears. A convenient American edition is that by Kellogg (Ginn). The opposition just mentioned comes out more clearly in the 'Orator.' This portrays the ideal public speaker. His chief accomplishments are summed up in versatility,—the power to adapt himself to any case and audience. An interesting passage discusses the rhythms of prose. This book has been elaborately edited by J.E. Sandys. In these three dialogues Cicero says everything of importance, at least once; and the other rhetorical works in the Corpus may be neglected here, the more as the most practical working rhetoric among them all, the 'Auctor ad Herennium,' is certainly not Cicero's. It is probably by Cornificius, and is especially important as the first complete prose work transmitted to us in authentic Latin form. (Cato's 'De Re Rustica' has been "modernized.") The later history of the Ciceronian correspondence is a dark and much contested field. (The most recent discussion, with bibliography, is by Schanz, in Iwan Müller's Handbuch, Vol. viii., pp. 238-243.) Probably Cicero's devoted freedman Tiro laid the foundations of our collections. The part of Petrarch in recovering the letters during the "Revival of Learning" was much less than has been supposed. The letters themselves are in wild confusion. There are four collections, entitled 'To Atticus,' 'To Friends,' 'To Brother Marcus,' 'To Brutus': altogether over eight hundred epistles, of which a relatively small number are written to Cicero by his correspondents. The order is not chronological, and the dates can in many cases only be conjectured. Yet these letters afford us our chief sources for the history of this great epoch,—and the best insight we can ever hope to have into the private life of Roman gentlemen. The style of the cynical, witty Cælius, or of the learned lawyer Sulpicius, differs perceptibly in detail from Cicero's own; yet it is remarkable that all seem able to write clearly if not gracefully. Cicero's own style varies very widely. The letters to Atticus are usually colloquial, full of unexplained allusions, sometimes made intentionally obscure and pieced out with a Greek phrase, for fear of the carrier's treachery! Other letters again, notably a long 'Apologia' addressed to Lentulus after Cicero's return from exile, are as plainly addressed in reality to the public or to posterity as are any of the orations. Prof. R. Y. Tyrrell has long been engaged upon an annotated edition of all the letters in chronological order. This will be of the utmost value. An excellent selection, illustrating the orator's public life chiefly, has been published by Professor Albert Watson. This volume contains also very full tables of dates, bibliography of all Cicero's works, and in general is indispensable for the advanced Latin student. The same letters annotated by Professor Watson have been delightfully translated by G. E. Jeans. To this volume, rather than to Forsyth's biography, the English reader should turn to form his impressions of Cicero at first hand. It is a model of scholarly—and also literary—translation. The "New Academy," to which Cicero inclined in philosophy, was skeptical in its tendencies, and regarded absolute truth as unattainable. This made it easier for Cicero to cast his transcriptions in the form of dialogues, revealing the beliefs of the various schools through the lips of the several interlocutors. Thus the 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum' sets forth in three successive conversations the ideas of Epicureans, of Stoics, and of the Academy, on the Highest Good. It is perhaps the chief of these treatises,—though we would still prefer to have even those later compendiums of the Greek schools through which Cicero probably cited the chief philosophers at second hand! J. S. Reid, an eminent English scholar, has spent many years upon this dialogue, and his work includes a masterly translation. With a somewhat similar plan, the three books of the 'De Natura Deorum' contain the views of the three schools on the Divine Beings. The speakers are Cicero's Roman contemporaries. This rather sketchy work has been annotated by J. B. Mayor in his usual exhaustive manner. The now fragmentary dialogue entitled 'The Republic,' and its unfinished supplement 'The Laws,' were composed and named in avowed rivalry with Plato's two largest works, but fail to approach the master. The Roman Constitution is defended as the ideal mingling of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The student of pure literature can for the most part neglect these, and others among the hastily written philosophic works, with the explicit approval of so indefatigable a student as Professor B. L. Gildersleeve. The chief fragment preserved of the 'Republic' is the 'Dream of Scipio.' Its dependence on the vision at the close of Plato's 'Republic' should be carefully observed. It may be fairly described as a free translation and enlargement from Greek originals, of which Plato's passage is the chief. Plagiarism was surely viewed quite otherwise then than now. Still, the Roman additions and modifications are interesting also,—and even as a translator Cicero is no ordinary cicerone! Moreover, in this as in so many other examples, the Latin paraphrase had a wider and more direct influence than the original. It has been accepted with justice ever since, as the final and most hopeful pagan word in favor of the soul's immortality. The lover of Chaucer will recall the genial paraphrase of 'Scipio's Dream' in the 'Parlament of Foules' (stanzas 5-12). We give below, entire, in our quotations from Cicero, the masterly version of the 'Dream,' prepared by Prof. T. R. Lounsbury for his edition of Chaucer's poems. The speaker is the younger Scipio Africanus, and his visit to Africa as a subaltern here described was in 149 B.C., three years previous to his own decisive campaign against Carthage which ended in the destruction of the city. Cicero shared in full the Roman tendency to give a practical, an ethical turn to all metaphysical discussion. This is prominent in the popular favorite among his larger volumes, the 'Tusculan Disputations.' In each of the five related books a thesis is stated negatively, to be triumphantly reversed later on:— (1) "Death seems to me an evil." (2) "I think pain the greatest of all evils." (3) "Misery seems to me to befall the wise man." (4) "It does not appear to me that the wise man can be secure from distress of mind." (5) "Character does not seem to me sufficient for happiness in life." The original portion of this work is relatively large, and many Roman illustrations occur. Dr. Peabody has included the Tusculans, the two brief essays next mentioned, and the 'De Officiis,' in his excellent series of versions (Little, Brown and Company). The little dialogue on 'Old Age' is perhaps most read of all Cicero's works. Its best thoughts, it must be confessed, are freely borrowed from the opening pages of Plato's 'Republic.' Still, on this theme of universal human interest, the Roman also offers much pleasant food for thought. The moderation of the Greek is forgotten by Cicero, the professional advocate and special pleader, who almost cries out to us at last:— "Grow old along with me: It was written in 45-4 B.C. The other little essay 'On Friendship' does not deserve to be bound up in such good company, though it usually is so edited. Bacon's very brief essay has more meat in it. Cicero had many good friends, but fully trusted hardly any one of them—not even Atticus. It was an age which put friendship to fearful trial, and the typical Roman seems to us rather selfish and cold. Certainly this essay is in a frigid tone. Professor Gildersleeve, I believe, has likened it to a treatise of Xenophon on hunting, so systematically is the pursuit of friends discussed. Perhaps the most practical among Roman Manuals of Morals is the treatise on Duties ('De Officiis'), in three books. Here the personal experience of sixty years is drawn upon, avowedly for the edification of young Marcus, the author's unworthy son. This sole Ciceronian survivor of Antony's massacres lived to be famous for his capacity in wine-drinking, and to receive officially, as consul under Augustus, the news of Antony's final defeat and death—a dramatic revenge. Most of these philosophic treatises were composed near the end of Cicero's life, largely in one marvelously productive year, 45-4 B.C., just previous to the slaying of Cæsar. Not all even of the extant works have been catalogued here. The 'Academica' and 'De Divinatione' should at least be mentioned. Such were Cicero's distractions, when cut off from political life and oratory, and above all when bereft by Tullia's death. The especial 'Consolatio,' composed to regain his courage after this blow, must head the list of lost works. It took a most pessimistic view of human life, for which it was reproved by Lactantius. Another perished essay, the 'Hortensius,' introducing the whole philosophic series, upheld Milton's thesis, "How charming is divine philosophy," and first turned the thoughts of Augustine to serious study. Cicero's poems, chiefly translations, are extant in copious fragments. They show metrical facility, a little taste, no creative imagination at all. A final proof of his unresting activity is his attempt to write history. Few, even among professional advocates, could have less of the temper for mere narration and truth. Indeed, reasonable disregard for the latter trammel is frankly urged upon a friend who was to write upon the illustrious moments of Cicero's own career! We said at first that the caprice of fate had exaggerated some sides of Cicero's activity, by removing all competitors. In any case, however, his supremacy among Italian orators, and in the ornate discursive school of eloquence generally, could not have been questioned. Yet more: As a stylist, he lifted a language hitherto poor in vocabulary, and stiff in phrase, to a level it never afterward surpassed. Many words he successfully coined, chiefly either by translation or free imitation of Greek originals. His clear, copious, rhythmical phrase was even more fully his own creation. Indeed, at the present moment, four or five great forms of living speech testify to Cicero's amazing mastery over both word and phrase. The eloquence of Castelar, Crispi, and Gambetta, of Gladstone and of Everett, is shot through and through, in all its warp and woof, with golden Ciceronian threads. The 'Archias' speaks to any appreciative student of Western Europe, as it were, in a mother tongue which dominates his vernacular speech. Human language, then, has become a statelier memorial of Cicero than even his vanity can ever have imagined. (After writing the substance of this paragraph, I was glad to find myself in close agreement with Mackail's words in his masterly little 'Latin Literature,' page 62.)
The most ancient historical books of the Chinese date from the time of Yao.
The events of his reign were chronicled by contemporaneous writers;
tradition being the foundation of all previous Chinese history.
Extended far, down to the valley's depths,
With leaves luxuriant. The orioles
Fluttered around, and on the bushy trees
In throngs collected,—whence their pleasant notes
Resounded far in richest melody....
To see, I go. The matron I have told,
Who will announcement make. Meanwhile my clothes,
My private clothes, I wash, and rinse my robes.
Which of them need be rinsed? and which need not?
My parents dear to visit back I go."
Why vex one's self about the things of time?
My part shall be to drain the flowing cup
And sleep away the fumes of drowsy wine.
The Bird which sings in yonder leafy trees,
What season of the year had come its round.
"The Spring," he says,
"When every breath of air suggests a song."
And turn again to brightening, cheering wine,
And sing until the moon shines, and until
Sleep and oblivion close my eyes again.
SELECTED MAXIMS
On Morals, Philosophy of Life, Character, Circumstances, etc.From the Chinese Moralists
Be careful night and day;
Men trip not on mountains,
They trip on ant-hills.
Watchfully and reverently
With entire intelligence served God,
And so secured the great blessing.—
Of one hundred virtues, filial piety is the first.RUFUS CHOATE
(1799-1859)
BY ALBERT STICKNEY
Is on his way attended,
At length ... perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.'"
THE PURITAN IN SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS LIFE
From Address Delivered at the Ipswich Centennial, 1834
THE NEW-ENGLANDER'S CHARACTER
From Address Delivered at the Ipswich Centennial, 1834
OF THE AMERICAN BAR
From the Address before the Cambridge Law School, 1845
DANIEL WEBSTER
From Eulogy delivered at Dartmouth College, 1853
ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM
(A.D. 347-407)
BY JOHN MALONE
THAT REAL WEALTH IS FROM WITHIN
From the 'Treatise to prove that no one can harm the man who does not injure himself'
ON ENCOURAGEMENT DURING ADVERSITY
From the 'Letters to Olympias'
CONCERNING THE STATUTES
From Homily VIII.
MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO
(106-43 B.C.)
BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON
And under each a friend."
The best is yet to be.
The last of life, for which the first was made!"