’Strain your wine, and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?  In the moment of our talking envious time has slipped away.  Seize the present, trust to-morrow e’en as little as you may’”.

Passing on to the second book of the treatise, we hear the advocate of the counter-doctrine.  Why, exclaims the Stoic, introduce Pleasure to the councils of Virtue?  Why uphold a theory so dangerous in practice?  Your Epicurean soon turns Epicure, and a class of men start up who have never seen the sun rise or set, who squander fortunes on cooks and perfumers, on costly plate and gorgeous rooms, and ransack sea and land for delicacies to supply their feasts.  Epicurus gives his disciples a dangerous discretion in their choice.  There is no harm in luxury (he tells us) provided it be free from inordinate desires.  But who is to fix the limit to such vague concessions?

Nay, more, he degrades men to the level of the brute creation.  In his view, there is nothing admirable beyond this pleasure—­no sensation or emotion of the mind, no soundness or health of body.  And what is this pleasure which he makes of such high account?  How short-lived while it lasts! how ignoble when we recall it afterwards!  But even the common feeling and sentiments of men condemn so selfish a doctrine.  We are naturally led to uphold truth and abhor deceit, to admire Regulus in his tortures, and to despise a lifetime of inglorious ease.  And then follows a passage which echoes the stirring lines of Scott—­

  “Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! 
  To all the sensual world proclaim,
  One crowded hour of glorious life
  Is worth an age without a name”.

Do not then (concludes the Stoic) take good words in your mouth, and prate before applauding citizens of honour, duty, and so forth, while you make your private lives a mere selfish calculation of expediency.  We were surely born for nobler ends than this, and none who is worthy the name of a man would subscribe to doctrines which destroy all honour and all chivalry.  The heroes of old time won their immortality not by weighing pleasures and pains in the balance, but by being prodigal of their lives, doing and enduring all things for the sake of their fellow-men.

The opening scene in the third book is as lively and dramatic as (what was no doubt the writer’s model) the introduction of a Platonic dialogue.  Cicero has walked across from his Tusculan villa to borrow some manuscripts from the well-stocked library of his young friend Lucullus[1]—­a youth whose high promise was sadly cut short, for he was killed at Philippi, when he was not more than twenty-three.  There, “gorging himself with books”, Cicero finds Marcus Cato—­a Stoic of the Stoics—­who expounds in a high tone the principles of his sect.

[Footnote 1:  See p. 43.]