[[1]] In Volkmann's edition of Plotinus, the sole attempt at a critical text worthy of the name that has yet been made, the passage runs as follows:
[[2]] Spinoza's answer to the "melancholici qui laudat vitam incultem et agrestem" (iv Prop., 35, note), that men can provide for their needs better by society than by solitude, hardly meets the higher criticism of the State. Yet it anticipates Fichte's retort to Rousseau. Spinoza, if this were written circa 1665, has in view, perhaps, the Trappists, then reorganized by Bossuet's friend, and perhaps also Port Royal aux Champs.
[[3]] The writings of St. Augustine by their extraordinary variety, vast intellectual range, and the impression of a distinct personal utterance which flows from every page at which they are opened, exercise upon the imagination an effect like that which the works of Diderot or Goethe alone of moderns have the power to reproduce. The De Civitate is his greatest and most sustained effort, and though controversial in intention it reaches again and again an epic sublimity both in imagery and diction. The peoples and empires of the world are the heroes, and the part which Augustine assigns to the God of all the earth has curious reminiscences of the parts played by the deities in pagan poetry. Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme. Criticism indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the men of after times who loved them most—Tacitus and St. Augustine, Dante, Racine, and Flaubert.
[[4]] The World-History of Otho of Freisingen was modelled upon the De Civitate of St. Augustine. He styles it the "Book of the Two Cities," i.e., Babylon and Jerusalem, and sketches from the mediaeval standpoint the course of human life from the origin of the world to the year A.D. 1146. His work on the Apocalypse and his impression of the Last Judgment are a fitting close to the whole. He is uncritical in the use of his materials, but conveys a distinct impression of his habits of thought; and something of the brooding calm of a mediaeval monastery invests the work. In the following year he started on the crusade of Konrad III, his half-brother; but returning in safety, wrote his admirable annals of the early deeds of the hero of the age, the emperor Barbarossa.