finally, Marcus himself not only loved her tenderly, as the kind mother of his eleven children, but in his Meditations actually thanks the gods for having granted him “such a wife, so obedient so affectionate, and so simple.”  No doubt Faustina was unworthy of her husband; but surely it is the glory and not the shame of a noble nature to be averse from jealousy and suspicion, and to trust to others more deeply than they deserve.

So blameless was the conduct of Marcus Aurelius that neither the malignity of contemporaries nor the sprit of posthumous scandal has succeeded in discovering any flaw in the extreme integrity of his life and principles.  But meanness will not be baulked of its victims.  The hatred of all excellence which made Caligula try to put down the memory of great men rages, though less openly, in the minds of many.  They delight to degrade human life into that dull and barren plain “in which every molehill is a mountain, and every thistle a forest-tree.”  Great men are as small in their eyes as they are said to be in the eyes of their valets; and there are multitudes who, if they find

     “Some stain or blemish in a name of note,
      Not grieving that their greatest are so small,
      Innate themselves with some insane delight,
      And judge all nature from her feet of clay,
      Without the will to lift their eyes, and see
      Her godlike head crown’d with spiritual fire,
      And touching other worlds.”

This I suppose is the reason why, failing to drag down Marcus Aurelius from his moral elevation, some have attempted to assail his reputation because of the supposed vileness of Faustina and the actual depravity of Commodus.  Of Faustina I have spoken already.  Respecting Commodus, I think it sufficient to ask with Solomon:  “Who knoweth whether his son shall be a wise man or a fool?” Commodus was but nineteen when his father died; for the first three years of his reign he ruled respectably and acceptably.  Marcus Aurelius had left no effort untried to have him trained aright by the first teachers and the wisest men whom the age produced; and Herodian distinctly tells us that he had lived virtuously up to the time of his father’s death.  Setting aside natural affection altogether, and even assuming (as I should conjecture from one or two passages of his Meditations) that Marcus had misgivings about his son, would it have been easy, would it have been even possible, to set aside on general grounds a son who had attained to years of maturity?  However this may be, if there are any who think it worth while to censure Marcus because, after all, Commodus turned out to be but “a warped slip of wilderness,” their censure is hardly sufficiently discriminating to deserve the trouble of refutation.