eclectic process—­adopting and rearranging such of the doctrines of his Greek masters as approved themselves to his own judgment—­he might make his own work a substitute for theirs.  His ambition is to achieve what he might well regard as the hardest of tasks—­a popular treatise on philosophy; and he has certainly succeeded.  He makes no pretence to originality; all he can do is, as he expresses it, “to array Plato in a Latin dress”, and “present this stranger from beyond the seas with the freedom of his native, city”.  And so this treatise on the Ends of Life—­a grave question even to the most careless thinker—­is, from the nature of the case, both dramatic and rhetorical.  Representatives of the two great schools of philosophy—­the Stoics and Epicureans—­plead and counter-plead in his pages, each in their turn; and their arguments are based on principles broad and universal enough to be valid even now.  For now, as then, men are inevitably separated into two classes—­amiable men of ease, who guide their conduct by the rudder-strings of pleasure—­who for the most part “leave the world” (as has been finely said) “in the world’s debt, having consumed much and produced nothing";[1] or, on the other hand, zealous men of duty,

  “Who scorn delights and live laborious days”,

and act according to the dictates of their honour or their conscience.  In practice, if not in theory, a man must be either Stoic or Epicurean.

[Footnote 1:  Lord Derby.]

Each school, in this dialogue, is allowed to plead its own cause.  “Listen” (says the Epicurean) “to the voice of nature that bids you pursue pleasure, and do not be misled by that vulgar conception of pleasure as mere sensual enjoyment; our opponents misrepresent us when they say that we advocate this as the highest good; we hold, on the contrary, that men often obtain the greatest pleasure by neglecting this baser kind.  Your highest instances of martyrdom—­of Decii devoting themselves for their country, of consuls putting their sons to death to preserve discipline—­are not disinterested acts of sacrifice, but the choice of a present pain in order to procure a future pleasure.  Vice is but ignorance of real enjoyment.  Temperance alone can bring peace of mind; and the wicked, even if they escape public censure, ’are racked night and day by the anxieties sent upon them by the immortal gods’.  We do not, in this, contradict your Stoic; we, too, affirm that only the wise man is really happy.  Happiness is as impossible for a mind distracted by passions, as for a city divided by contending factions.  The terrors of death haunt the guilty wretch, ’who finds out too late that he has devoted himself to money or power or glory to no purpose’.  But the wise man’s life is unalloyed happiness.  Rejoicing in a clear conscience, ’he remembers the past with gratitude, enjoys the blessings of the present, and disregards the future’.  Thus the moral to be drawn is that which Horace (himself, as he expresses it, ‘one of the litter of Epicurus’) impresses on his fair friend Leuconoee: