recently-adopted profession with so much disgust, yet we are inclined to think that its discipline had already been of essential service to him.

No one of the writers of the iron age approaches him in the skill with which he seizes the weak point of an antagonist's argument, and presses it by fair debate into every possible service which can be available to his own case. He seldom if ever states his antagonist's position unfairly for the sake of an argument, though frequently to make it more ridiculous; but once having seized his premises he never loses sight of them. With a directness and a pertinacity which almost awakens our sympathy for his adversary, he forces him along until he has reduced both him and his argument to the most hopeless absurdity; for with Lucian they both usually have to expiate their errors together. His "Hermotimus" and his "Convicted Jupiter" are masterly exhibitions of dialectic sagacity and vigor. The absence of all evidence that Lucian possessed either a philosophical or an investigating mind, compels us to think that his superior dexterity in debate was chiefly the result of his education. He certainly had been exposed to no educational influences better adapted to such ends than the gymnastics of the Roman bar.

Having now abandoned the profession of an advocate, for which he entertained so little sympathy, he devoted himself chiefly to the profession of a rhetor, or sophist-travelled about in Greece, Italy, and Gaul, and, perhaps, in Spain. In Gaul he established a large school of rhetoric, and was so successful as to secure for himself, while there, a pecuniary independence, which enabled him to withdraw from all professional avocations, and devote himself exclusively to literature, an opportunity of which he was prompt to avail himself. For the sophists he appears to have entertained far deeper contempt than for the lawyers, although their professional education and duties were of so kindred a nature. To him they appeared, as a class, a set of vulgar, presuming, and ignorant charlatans, who, if they had not been dishonest enough to be sycophants, would have been ostracised for their

conceit.

In his "School for Orators," which is a letter of advice conceived through

out in a spirit of most bitter and cutting irony, and which in form Swift has imitated with such signal success in his "Directions to Servants," he shows up the charlatanry of this class of literary functionaries with too much naturalness and graphic power to be far from the truth. "What therefore you must in the first place bring with you are, ignorance and audacity, with a good proportion of presumption and impudence; but you will do well to leave decency, modesty, and bashfulness at home, as they are not only perfectly useless, but would even prove prejudicial. Get, however, a good stentorian pair of lungs, and a confident declamatory tone, and a gait and gesture like mine: these properties are indispensably necessary, but these alone are not sufficient. You must strike the eye by the elegance of your dress. Provide yourself, therefore, a habit of the finest Tarentine stuff, white, and gaily embroidered, and have handsome Attic slippers, such as the ladies wear, or Sicyonian shoes, which suit admirably with white stockings. Next you must get by rote fifteen or at most twenty Attic phrases of all descriptions, and render them so fluent to you that they shall regularly slip off your tongue of themselves. With these bestrew all your speeches as with sugar, and never mind if the rest of your words suit well or ill with them, or what effect they have upon the sentence in which you introduce them. If the purple gown be extremely fine and of a fine color, the rest may be of ever so coarse a cloth.

"In the next place, you must take especial care to employ a great pro fusion of unintelligible, unprecedented words, seldom appearing in the ancients; for that gives you consequence with the great mass-causes them to regard you as a man of immense study, and learned above their comprehension. You may perhaps occasionally venture to surprise them with strange and quite new words of your own invention; and should it happen to you from time to time to commit solecisms and barbarisms, you have an infallible resource in impudence, and may name some poet or prose writer for your authority though he never existed, who was a profound scholar and an excellent judge of language, and approved of this mode of expression. Should a

case occur in which you are to speak on a given subject upon the spur of the occasion, put aside the difficult propositions with disdain as too easy and schoolboyish, and then begin without premeditation, and run with your discourse, speaking whatever comes into your head, careless whether you proceed from first to second, as the pedants do, and so on to the third, severally in their order; but what comes up is with you the first, though the boot light on the head and the helmet on the leg. Do you always rush on, make one word strike upon another; so that none of them stick in the middle, all goes well. Suppose you are to speak at Athens about some robber or adulterer, do you speak of what is done in India or Ecbatana, but above all forget not the battle of Marathon and Cynæzius, without which nothing at all is to be effected. Sail likewise round about Mount Athos, and cross the Hellespont on foot. Let the sun be darkened by the arrows of the Persians. Let Xerxes be put to flight, and Leonidas be the he ro. Let the letter be read which Ottryrades wrote with his blood, and Salamis, Artemisium, and Platæa, be bravely blazoned forth; the thicker these come upon each other the better." This is doubtless caricatured, but "a character, even in the most distorted view taken of it by the most angry and prejudiced minds, generally retains something of its life. "No caricaturist ever represented Mr. Pitt as a Falstaff, or Mr. Fox as a skeleton."

We have nothing in modern literature which will compare exactly with the rhetorical exercises of the ancient Sophists. Our industrial classes in literature, as in all other occupations, aim at the advancement of some practical interest, to make out some point, to which the skill of the artist is only an auxiliary, otherwise they command the attention of a very limited class. The Rhetors, on the other hand, wrote and spoke, not to prove any case, nor "as they needed anything," but merely to display the capabilities of their art. Where the demand of society would sustain such a species of literary industry, we may readily conceive the character of the article produced. It

was the form of expression, not the thought expressed, upon which the speakers relied for awakening the interest of their hearers. Hence a perpetual demand for startling phrases, and forms of expression, for musically balanced periods and expressions, without any of that nervous energy which springs only from a mind in earnest and anxious to convince. Hence, too, a fatiguing sameness both in the outline and the filling up of these exercises. They are usually wrought upon some model which has become the fashion. They are filled up like a law pleading, from precedents, and altogether destitute of that abandon on the part of the artist which indicates earnestness, and which is the invariable accompaniment of true eloquence. Lucian ridicules this vice of the Sophists very happily in his Jupiter Tragœdus. Jupiter is about to open a public assembly, when he suddenly discovers that he has forgotten a very fine exordium which he had prepared for his speech. In the extremity of embarrassment, he asks Mercury how it would do to rhapsodize to them the old Homeric Exordium:

† Double Indictment, vol. ii., p. 618.

any of the rhetors of the empire; yet we are continually encountering in his "suasoria" and "controversiæ," questions in which he could never have taken other than a coquettish sort of interest. For example. Ought Alexander to have prosecuted his conquests by sea? Ought the three hundred Greeks to have fought when deserted by their comrades? Should Cicero have begged his life of Antony? Should Hannibal after the battle of Canna have marched directly to Rome? &c., &c. What amount of refreshment the audience might have derived from discussions of imaginary theses such as these, it is difficult for us at the present day to estimate; but under any view of the matter, we cannot think otherwise than meanly of the mental culture and aspirations of those who found in them permanent sources of amusement and occupation-doubt less fit audience, however, for such instruction. Both parties richly deserved the sarcasm which the philosopher Demonax applied to a pair of dunces standing in a somewhat similar relation to each other:-" One of these honest men," said the philosopher, appears to be milking a he-goat, while the other is holding a sieve for him."

The success of Lucian as a rhetor was very distinguished. The best exercises of this kind which he has left us, and which he seems to have selected himself from a mass of similar compositions most deserving preservation, are "the Tyrannicide," the "Disinherited Son," and the "First and Second Phalaris." They are not destitute of the wit and fancy which distinguish his other writings, while they abound in those lesser graces of diction and melody which gave this class of writing its chief attraction to the ancient Greeks.

But it is not Lucian the sophist, nor Lucian the lawyer, nor Lucian the statuary, that we propose here to study and interpret. It is the approaching phase of his career, when, in the full maturity of his intellect and the plenitude of his experience, he boldly addressed himself to the task of exposing the social absurdities and errors of his age, in defiance of the veneration and sanctity with which time and authority had invested them. Before entering upon that part of his career, how

ever, we will dispose of the few remaining incidents in the life of Lucian which history has preserved.

We are told that he married, and had one son, and was made a Prefect in Egypt, at an advanced period of his life, by the Emperor Marcus Antoninus. About all we know of his occupation while there, and during the remainder of his life, we gather from his own writings. "For if you please to inquire into it, you will find that not the least considerable part of the government of Egypt is in my hands, as I am appointed to preside over and regulate the several courts of judicature, and to provide that all the legal proceedings are conducted in due orderto register whatever is said or transacted, to arrange the speeches of the lawyers, and, above all, to preserve the rescripts of the Emperor in their utmost exactitude and perspicuity, with the most sacred and inviolable fidelity, and deposit them in the public archives, for posterity to the end of time. Moreover, I receive my salary, not from a private individual, but from the Emperor himself; neither does it consist in such and such a number of oboli and drachmæ by the year, but amounts to several talents. Besides, I have no small hope, if things go on in a regular channel, as they ought, to be elected governor-general of the province, or to obtain some other post of equal promise." Probably things did not go on as they ought, as this announcement is the latest act of his life which history has recorded.

As near as we can judge Lucian was about forty years of age when he relinquished the profession of a rhetorician, and devoted himself exclusively to the cultivation and indulgence of his literary tastes. Hitherto he had made use of prevailing opinions and institutions as a means of support. Henceforth history commends him to our consideration as an innovator. To appreciate him properly in this new attitude, it is necessary to take a view of the society which he was to move so powerfully, and select the point in that social system upon which this reformer, sunlike, should have stationed himself, at the time of which we speak, to radiate the agents of decomposition most effectually upon the errors and vices of the existing institutions.

Every nation, while in a state of

formative or organizing civilisation, has its ideal. To realize this ideal is its chiefend and purpose-the burden of its aspirations. In whatsoever nation this ideal is not aspired to, we may conclude that its institutions are in a state of decomposition. Their purposethe element of their vitality, is gone. Decay takes possession of a deceased institution, with as little hesitation as of a dead beast of the field. The Romans had found their ideal in war, religion, and philosophy. The Roman law, probably their greatest national originality, and which constitutes one of their most permanent claims to our admiration, presented no ideal attractions to the mass of the nation beyond the element of stoical philosophy, which was present at its birth, and which presided over its growth and invigorated its character. Their law, therefore, never formed an ideal to the Romans distinct from their philosophy. It is hardly too much to say that at the commencement of the reign of the Emperor Adrian, the Roman people had achieved every result which was to have been expected, with their materials, in war, in religion and philosophy. The energies of all these three powers had been exhausted, as, we think, can be readily made to

appear.

For upwards of two centuries the civilized world had enjoyed almost uninterrupted peace. The Roman was no longer a conquering nation, except in vindication of national dignity. The Emperor Adrian not only declined to enlarge the territory of the empire, but perilled his reputation by voluntarily relinquishing many of the military acquisitions of his ambitious predecessors. Foreigners, and even slaves, were fast filling the ranks, and engrossing the faded honors which once attracted the proudest and the bravest of the Roman nobility. That famous soldiery, then but recently so terrible among nations, had exchanged the profession of the soldier for that of the demagogue; were dictating laws to Roman Senate; raising up and pulling down Emperors with as little ceremony as they would change a guard; and soon were to crown their mercenary career of insubordination by selling the

a

empire of the world at public auction to a wealthy and infatuated blockhead. An equally fatal termination awaited the favorite schools of philosophy, which for so long a time had deluded with their absurdities the wisest philosophers and statesmen of the republic. The military spirit expired when no more unconquered nations could be found to gratify its insatiable appetite. A military spirit, like fruit, the day it ceases to grow, that day it begins to corrupt. Even so the mission of the old philosophies had been fulfilled: their work was accomplished, and neither the genius of Lucretius nor the imperial encouragement of the Antonines could prolong their dominion. The reason, we think, may be readily shown.

At the time of which we speak the Epicurean and Stoic philosophies were by far the most popular and acceptable systems then known throughout the civilized world. Almost all the powerful and influential men of the time who affected philosophy at all, had ranged themselves under one of these sects. And it may be added that the other systems, whose influence had either expired or was for a time suspended, contained many of the elements of finality and dissolution which were found incompatible with perpetuity in the two we have mentioned.

It is quite obvious that the first of these, the Epicurean philosophy, had no chance of maintaining a permanent dominion over the minds of a people who were ready to appreciate the lof tier ethics of the Christian dispensation. The negation of a future life, the absence of future accountability, and the grossest practical selfishness, can never maintain, as a scheme of life, even a speculative confidence for any length of time. The selfishness of Epicurus was by no means the enlightened self-interest of Bentham or of Paley; "sensibus ipsis judicari voluptates," was his creed. He never pretended that the observance of the true interest of each would result in the true interest of all. He contemplated a collision of interests, and justified it. The moment that point was assumed the existence of right and wrong as entities was denied. The

conscience would be guided in different men by codes of law as different as the circumstances by which they found themselves respectively surrounded. A practical adherence to the logical consequences of this theory would effectually prevent the harmonizing of motives among men, and must inevitably result in the dissolution of all society. We would not be understood to intimate that the Epicureans were all abandoned men. On the contrary, that school has been illustrated by some of the wisest, purest, bravest men in history, not through, but rather in spite of their philosophy. They were not all like Aristippus, but their principles were liable to make them even worse. We should no more judge of the practical operation of the selfish philosophy by the personal character of Epicurus, than of the influence of absolute power on its possessors from the behavior of Marcus Aurelius or Haroun al Raschid.

The Stoic philosophy, though less offensive to the moral sense, was equally incompetent to marshal with success the varied and mysterious forces of the human soul. Its obstinate antagonism to nature was alone fatal to its perpetuity. Pain and pleasure were but diseases of the mind, not to be prevented by removing the cause, but to be endured. Epictetus sums up their whole system in three words "avεxov kaι anexov" (bear and forbear). Abstinence, resistance, patience, were their cardinal virtues, for the exercise of which they avoided no opportunity, not because by these virtues they were enabled to bear up with less pain against the necessary ills of life, but as a process of educating their senses into a perfect indifference to all pain or misfortune, their ideal state of humanity. Epictetus, while yet a slave, permits his master, who was trifling with him one day, to twist his leg until he broke it, rather than complain. But every one has not, like Epictetus, the fortitude to endure the breaking of a limb with composure. Such an outrageous warfare upon the laws of nature, beside that it is full of error, is perfectly intolerable, as Epictetus himself substantially admits. "Alas! we are able to read and write these things,

and to praise them when they are read, but very far from being convinced by them; therefore what is said of the Lacedemonians, lions at home, foxes at Ephesus,' may be applied to us, lions in the school, but foxes out of it.'"* There are some afflictions to which the stoutest heart must yield, and so the Stoic found. The pain would sometimes bear so hard that even the firmest mind could not maintain its independence. Then what was their resource? Suicide, in itself a practical refutation of their philosophy: this was the only refuge which Zeno, the great doctor of their system, could find from the pains of a broken thumb. He thought it wiser, and so taught his disciples, to destroy himself than to attempt to mitigate the calamities of life. "You may live now, if you please," says Marcus Antoninus, "as you would choose if you were near dying. But suppose people will not let you, why then give life the slip, but by no means make a misfortune of it. If the room smokes, I leave it, and there is an end; for why should one be concerned at the matter?" Seneca parades his estimation of the privilege of suicide, and nowhere does he display a more adequate utterance of strong enthusiasm than in describing the desperate act by which Cato terminated his career. With equal perverseness did this philosophy refuse all sympathy for the sufferings of others. A Stoic detected indulging an emotion of pity would blush as quickly as if caught in the act of stealing. Any kind of weakness was a crime. Endurance was the law. But in this law where do we look for the impulses to action and improvement? Where are the motives to discover or invent methods of increasing the comforts of men, of assuaging pain, of increasing our powers over the physical universe, of improving our heart or cultivating our understanding? The leading Stoics were always engaged, more or less, in public life, yet what have they done? What great instances of devotion to humanity have they ever exhibited? What great historic achievement have they ever accomplished? What durable institutions have they ever established?