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moral purity, his learning and vigor, while drawing attention and disciples to him, also provoked the envy of rival teachers, and the distrust of the officials over him. He was dismissed from office; and, in disfavor, in private life continued his studies and labors for fifteen years, from his thirty-fifth to his fiftieth year. Then for five years he was restored to the confidence of his sovereign. He at length lost his post as minister of the court in Loo, through the influence of some wantons who induced the ruler to violate and resent the austere precepts of the sage and abase him from his honors.

We catch impressive glimpses of his character in the sayings he has left. The Master said, "The superior man has dignified ease without pride; the mean man has pride without dignified ease.” The Master said, "Some men of worth retire from the world because of disrespect and contradiction." In his fifty-sixth year the injured Confucius turned from the seat of his fond hopes and started upon his exile. As he went along he looked back on Loo with a melancholy heart, and gave vent to his feelings in these verses :

O, how is it, azure Heaven,

From my home I thus am driven;
Through the land my way to trace,
With no certain dwelling-place?
Dark, all dark the minds of men!
Worth comes vainly to their ken.
Hastens on my term of years;
Desolate, old age appears.

For thirteen weary years he wandered from province to province, using his faculties and his renown to the utmost, but lamenting the want of Court position and patronage to give his teachings more effect. Once he said, "If any of the Princes would employ me, in the course of twelve months I should have done something considerable." At another time he said, "Am I a bitter gourd? Am I to be hung up out of the way of being eaten?" The world did not deal kindly with him; for in every province which he visited he met disappointment; now suffering from poverty, now from deserted

ness, now from persecution. Once he pined so sorely for home and friends that he cried aloud, "Let me return, let me return." Again he is said to have been several days without anything to eat. While tarrying in Wei he was so annoyed by applications to solve petty questions and settle disputes that he exclaimed, "The bird chooses its tree, the tree does not chase the bird,"—and prepared to depart.

Just then came his recall to Loo. He was sixty-nine years old. The remaining five years of his life he spent in peace; but not as he would have preferred. Denied any place of rank and authority, his counsels set at naught, he reluctantly turned away from his plan of tranquillizing and perfecting the State through the Sovereign and the Law, and devoted himself to the slower moral accomplishment of the same end by completing and transmitting his literary works. Perhaps one may understand something of his disappointment in being obliged to abandon a legislative and executive mission for a purely didactic and moral one, from the following tribute paid to him during his life by Tsze-kung, one of his disciples. Tsze-kung said, "Were our master in the position of the Prince of a State, he would plant the people, and forthwith they would be established; he would lead them on, and forthwith they would follow him; he would stimulate them, and forthwith they would be harmonious; he would make them happy, and forthwith, multitudes would resort to his dominions; while he lived, he would be glorious; when he died, he would be bitterly lamented."

Early one morning, it is said, he rose, and with his hands behind his back dragging his staff, moved about by his door, crooning, "The great mountain must crumble, the strong beam must break, and the wise man wither away like a plant. In all the provinces of the empire there arises not one intelligent monarch who will make me his master. My time has come to die." He went to his couch and never left it again. He expired on the eleventh day of March, four hundred and seventy-eight years before the birth of Jesus. Legge, the best of his English biographers, - from whose great work on the

Chinese Classics the chief data for this sketch have been drawn, has painted the closing scene well, and moralized on it not unkindly, though, possibly, in a tone a little too professional and conventional.

If the end of the great sage of China, as he sank behind the cloud, was melancholy, it was not unimpressive. He had drank the bitterness of disappointed hopes: the great ones of the empire had failed to accept his instructions. But his mind was magnanimous and his heart was serene. He was a lonely old man, — parents, wife, child, friends, all gone, but this made the fatal message so much the more welcome. Without any expectation of a future life, uttering no prayer, betraying no fear, he approached the dark valley with the strength and peace of a well-ordered will wisely resigned to Heaven, beyond a doubt treasuring in his heart the assurance of having served his fellow-men in the highest spirit he knew and with the purest light he had.

For twenty-five centuries he has been as unreasonably venerated as he was unjustly neglected in his life. His name is on every lip throughout China, his person in every imagination. The thousands of his descendants are a titled and privileged class by themselves. The dif fusion and intensity of the popular admiration and honor for him are wonderful. Countless temples are reared to him, millions of tablets inscribed to him. His authority is supreme. He is worshipped by the pupils of the schools, the magistrates, the Emperor himself in full pomp. Would that a small share of this superfluity had solaced some of the lonesome hours he knew while yet alive!

DEMOSTHENES.

In spite of his burning patriotism, great statesmanship, and unequalled oratoric triumphs, Demosthenes impresses us as one of the lonely personalities of history. His exceptional ethical depth and fervor, his pronounced strength of character, the determination he formed in his orphaned youth to secure justice on his guardians for the

neglect and wrong he had received from them, his tireless devotion both to the service of his country and to the art of eloquence, the stories of his long retirement in a cave, and of his solitary pacings on the stormy sea-shore, the bitterness with which a host of unscrupulous enemies pursued him through his whole career, - all combine to show that he was a man marked by a manifold isolation from his contemporaries. How he must have felt this, when for political reasons the Areopagus, with such foul injustice, decreed him guilty of pecuniary corruption ! When his haters, leagued with the rabble, had secured his banishment, it is said that he shed tears as he went. And during his exile in Egina, he went every day to sit on a cliff by the sea to gaze towards his beloved country. After the destruction of her liberties, the emissaries of the tyrant tracked him to the temple of Poseidon, where, turning at bay, he swallowed poison, and died at the foot of the altar. At a later day his penitent countrymen, whose eyes too late were opened to his nobleness, built him a tomb with the inscription, O Demosthenes, had thy power been equal to thy wisdom, the Macedonian Mars would never have triumphed in Greece !

TACITUS.

WHEN we read the ominous lines in which Tacitus has described the corruptions and cruelties of his countrymen, we form to ourselves a picture of the historian as a lofty and sombre soul, turning with angry disgust from the stews and theatres and streets of Rome, from the dissemblers, informers, plotters, poisoners, sycophants, revellers, and murderers around him, to live in his own thoughts. Regardless of immediate advantages, despising the arts of popularity, he turned in sorrow and scorn from the atrocities and beastly vices of pretors and emperors, and gave himself to the lonely task of transmitting to future times the terrible record of his own. This side of his life is revealed in his history. A softer and fairer phase of his soul, as it pleases us to imagine, appears expressed in

the sentiments he puts into the mouth of Maternus, in his dialogue concerning oratory. "Woods and groves and loneliness afford such delight to me that I reckon it among the chief blessings of poetry that it is cultivated far from the noise and bustle of the world, without a client to besiege my doors or a criminal to distress me with his tears and squalor. Let the sweet Muses lead me to their soft retreats, their living fountains, the melodious groves, where I may dwell remote from care, master of myself, under no necessity of doing every day what my heart condemns. Let me no more be seen in the wrangling forum a pale and anxious candidate for precarious fame. Let me live free from solicitude, a stranger to the art of promising legacies in order to buy the friendship of the great; and when nature shall give the signal to retire, may I possess no more than I may bequeath to whom I will. At my funeral let no token of sorrow be seen, no pompous mockery of woe. Crown me with chaplets; strew flowers on my grave; and let my friends erect no vain memorial to tell where my remains repose."

LUCRETIUS.

THE eloquent and mighty Lucretius, lifted far from the vulgar ignorance and superstition of his time, revolving sublime thoughts and emotions in his powerful mind, leaving to posterity scarcely a trace of himself, save his burning and wonderful De Natura Rerum, was as solitary in his time as though he had lived in an aerial car, anchored miles above Olympus. We wonder what frigid and distressful isolation of his warm heart, or what maddening sorrow, led him, at the early age of forty-four, to open into the abyss the forbidden door of suicide. His story and his end furnish another illustration of the truth, that, out of an hundred great men, with ninety and nine the penalty is more than the prize; the wreath on the head is less felt than the thorn in the bosom. It is to be hoped that he enjoyed a happy friendship with the Memmius to whom he addressed his poem. We recognize the proof of a

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