This is the kind

by the oracle of Apollo the wisest of men.' of wisdom they conceive to be in you, that you consider every thing connected with you to rest upon yourself, and consider the events of life as subordinate to virtue: therefore they inquire of me (I believe of you also, Scævola) in what manner you bear the death of Africanus. And the rather so, because on the last nones, when we had come into the gardens of Decius Brutus the augur, for the purpose of discussion, as our practice is, you were not present; although you were accustomed most punctually to observe that day and that engagement.

SCEVOLA. It is true, many are inquiring, Caius Lælius, as has been asserted by Fannius. But for my part I answer them according to what I have remarked, that you bear with patience the grief which you have suffered, by the death of one who was at once a very distinguished man, and a very dear friend; yet that you could not forbear being distressed, nor would that have been consistent with your feelings as And with regard to your not having attended last nones at our assembly, ill health was the cause, and not affliction.

a man.

LELIUS. You certainly said what was right, Scævola, and agreeable to truth: for neither ought I to have absented myself through any inconvenience of mine from that duty which I have always fulfilled when I was well; nor by any chance do I conceive it can happen to a man of firmness of character. that any interruption should take place in his duty. And as for you, Fannius, who say there is attributed to me so much merit, as I am neither conscious of nor lay claim to, you act therein like a friend: but, as it seems to me, you do not form a right estimate of Cato; for either there never has been a wise man, which I rather think, or if there ever was one, he was the man. For (to omit other cases) consider how

1 Socrates. See Plato's defense of Socrates.

2 "If thou must needs rule, be Zeno's king and enjoy that empire which every man gives himself. He who is thus his own monarch contentedly sways the scepter of himself, not envying the glory of crowned heads and Elohims of the earth. Could the world unite in the practice of that despised train of virtues which the divine ethics of our Saviour have so inculcated unto us, the furious face of things must disappear; Eden would be yet to be found, and the angels might look down, not with pity but jɔy upon us."-Sir Thomas Browne's Christian Morals, chap. xix.

he endured the loss of his son! I remember the instance of Paullus, and witnessed that of Gallus: but theirs was in the case of children; but Cato's is that of a mature and respected man. Wherefore pause before you prefer to Cato, even him whom Apollo, as you say, pronounced the wisest of men: for the deeds of the one are praised, but only the sayings of the other. Concerning myself, however (for I would now address you both), entertain the following sentiments.

III. Should I say that I am not distressed by the loss of Scipio, philosophers may determine with what propriety I should do so; but assuredly I should be guilty of falsehood. For I am distressed at being bereaved of such a friend, as no one, I consider, will ever be to me again, and, as I can confidently assert, no one ever was: but I am not destitute of a remedy. I comfort myself, and especially with this consolation, that I am free from that error by which most men, on the decease of friends, are wont to be tormented: for I feel that no evil has happened to Scipio; it has befallen myself, if indeed it has happened to any. Now to be above measure distressed at one's own troubles, is characteristic of the man who loves not his friend, but himself. In truth, as far as he is concerned, who can deny that his end was glorious? for unless he had chosen to wish for immortality, of which he had not the slightest thought, what did he fail to obtain which it was lawful for a man to wish for? A man who, as soon as he grew up, by his transcendent merit far surpassed those sanguine hopes of his countrymen which they had conceived regarding him when a mere boy, who never stood for the consulship, yet was made consul twice; on the first occasion before his time; on the second, at the proper age as regarded himself, though for the commonwealth almost too late; who, by overthrowing two cities,' most hostile to our empire, put an end, not only to all present, but all future wars. What shall I say of his most engaging manners; of his dutiful conduct to his mother; his generosity to his sisters; his kindness to his friends; his uprightness toward all? These are known to you and how dear he was to the state, was displayed by its mourning at his death. How, therefore, could the accession

1 Carthage was destroyed by Scipio, the second Africanus, B.C. 147; and Numantia, a town of Spain, B.C. 133. From the latter exploit he obtained the surname of Numantinus.

of a few years have benefited such a man? For although old age is not burdensome (as I recollect Cato asserted, in conversation with myself and Scipio the year before he died), yet it takes away that freshness which Scipio even yet possessed. Wherefore his life was such that nothing could be added to it, either in respect of good fortune or of glory: moreover, the very suddenness of his death took away the consciousness of it. On which kind of death it is difficult to pronounce: what men conjecture, you yourselves know.' However, this we may assert with truth, that of the many most glorious and joyous days which P. Scipio witnessed in the course of his life, that day was the most glorious when, on the breaking up of the senate, he was escorted home in the evening by the conscript fathers, by the allies of the Roman people, and the Latins, the day before he died; so that from so high a position of dignity he may seem to have passed to the gods above rather than to those below. Nor do I agree with those who have lately begun to assert this opinion, that the soul also dies simultaneously with the body, and that all things are annihilated by death."

"Certainly the stoics bestowed too much cost upon death, and by their great preparations made it appear more fearful. Better, saith he, 'qui finem vitæ extremum inter munera ponat naturæ.' It is as natural to die as to be born, and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other. He that dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind fixed and bent upon something that is good doth avert tho dolors of death; but above all believe it the sweetest canticle is, 'nunc dimittis,' when a man hath obtained worth, ends, and expectations. Death hath this also, that it openeth the gate to good fame and extinguisheth envy; 'extinctus amahitur idem."-Lord Bacon, Essay ii.

2 Ever since the time of Cicero the subject of the immortality of the soul has been incessantly discussed; by some as a conclusion of natural religion, by others as a doctrine of revelation. The following summary of the argument is given by Dugald Stewart in the second part of his Outlines of Moral Philosophy, cap. ii. sec. 1. The reasons he here states without any illustration for believing the doctrine of a future state, are the following:

"1. The natural desire of immortality, and the anticipations of futurity inspired by hope.

2. The natural apprehensions of the mind when under the influence of remorse.

"3. The exact accommodation of the condition of the lower animals to their instincts and to their sensitive powers, contrasted with the unsuitableness of the present state of things to the intellectual faculties of man;

IV. The authority of the ancients has more weight with me, either that of our own ancestors, who paid such sacred honors to the dead which surely they would not have done if they thought these honors did in no way affect them; or that of those who once lived in this country, and enlightened, by their institutions and instructions, Magna Græcia (which now indeed is entirely destroyed, but then was flourishing); or of him who was pronounced by the oracle of Apollo to be the wisest of men, who did not say first one thing and then another, as is generally done, but always the same; namely,

to his capacities of enjoyment, and to the conceptions of happiness and of perfection which he is able to form.

"4. The foundation which is laid in the principles of our constitution for a progressive and an unlimited improvement.

"5. The information we are rendered capable of acquiring concerning the more remote parts of the universe; the unlimited range which is opened to the human imagination through the immensity of space and of time, and the ideas, however imperfect, which philosophy affords us of the existence and attributes of an overruling mind-acquisitions for which an obvious final cause may be traced on the supposition of a future state, but which if that supposition be rejected, could have no other effect than to make the business of life appear unworthy of our regard.

"6. The tendency of the infirmities of age, and of the pains of disease to strengthen and confirm our moral habits, and the difficulty of accounting upon the hypothesis of annihilation for those sufferings which commonly put a period to the existence of man.

"7. The discordance between our moral judgments and feelings and the course of human affairs.

"8. The analogy of the material world, in some parts of which the most complete and the most systematical order may be traced; and of which our views always become the more satisfactory the wider our knowledge extends. It is the supposition of a future state alone that can furnish a key to the present disorders of the moral world; and without it many of the most striking phenomena of human life must remain forever inexplicable.

"9. The inconsistency of supposing that the moral laws which regulate the course of human affairs have no reference to any thing beyond the limits of the present scene; when all the bodies which compose the visible universe appear to be related to each other, as parts of one great physical system.

"Of the different considerations now mentioned, there is not one perhaps which, taken singly, would be sufficient to establish the truth they are brought to prove, but taken in conjunction, their force appears irresistible. They not only all terminate in the same conclusion, but they mutually reflect light on each other; and they hare that sort of consistency and connection among themselves which could hardly be sur→ posed to take place among a series of false propositions."

that the souls of men are divine, and that when they have departed from the body, a return to heaven is opened to them, and the speediest to the most virtuous and just.' Which same opinion was also held by Scipio; for he indeed, a very few days before his death, as if he had a presentiment of it, when Philus and Manilius were present, and many others, and you also,

1 So striking is the resemblance between the religious tenets of Cicero and those of modern philosophy, corrected by a divine revelation, that it is difficult to suppose that they should have originated in his own rcflections, unaided by any light derived through the medium of tradition or report. The idea contained in this passage we find reproduced, with little modification, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, by a moralist and ethical philosopher, neither of whom was at all likely to derive his opinions on such a subject from the writings of Cicero. By giving the former passage entire, I may perhaps lead the reader to believe that Sir Thomas Browne has added nothing to the conceptions of Cicero touching the immortality of the soul but superstition and folly. "I believe," he says, "that the whole frame of a beast doth perish, and is left in the same state after death as before it was materialed into life; that the souls of men know neither contrary or corruption; that they subsist beyond the body, and outlive death by the privilege of their proper natures, and without a miracle; that the souls of the faithful, as they leave earth, take possession.of heaven; that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood and villainy instilling, and stealing into our hearts; that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of the world; that these phantasms appear often, and do frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches; it is because these are the dormitories of the dead where the devil, like an insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies of his victory in Adam.”—Religio Medici, chap. xxxvii.

"We have," says Dr. Thomas Brown, "therefore to conceive the mind at death matured by experience, and nobler than it was when the Deity permitted it to exist; and the Deity himself, with all those gracious feelings of love to man which the adaption of human nature to its human scene displays, and in these very circumstances, if we affirm without any other proof the annihilation of the mind, we are to find a reason for this annihilation. If even we in such a moment, abstracting from all selfish considerations, would feel it a sort of crime to destroy, with no other view than that of the mere destruction what was more worthy of love than in years of earlier being, are we to believe that he who loves what is noble in man more than our frail heart can love it, will regard the improvements only as a signal of destruction? Is it not more consonant to the goodness of him who has rendered improvement progressive here, that in separating the mind from its bodily frame, he separates it to admit it into scenes in which the progress begun on earth may be continued with increasing facility."-Lecture xcvi.