Another complaint I have against Mr. Long is, that he is not quite idiomatic and simple enough.  It is a little formal, at least, if not pedantic, to say Ethic and Dialectic, instead of Ethics and Dialectics, and to say “Hellenes and Romans” instead of “Greeks and Romans.”  And why, too,—­the name of Antoninus being preoccupied by Antoninus Pius,[203]—­will Mr. Long call his author Marcus Antoninus instead of Marcus Aurelius? Small as these matters appear, they are important when one has to deal with the general public, and not with a small circle of scholars; and it is the general public that the translator of a short masterpiece on morals, such as is the book of Marcus Aurelius, should have in view; his aim should be to make Marcus Aurelius’s work as popular as the Imitation, and Marcus Aurelius’s name as familiar as Socrates’s.  In rendering or naming him, therefore, punctilious accuracy of phrase is not so much to be sought as accessibility and currency; everything which may best enable the Emperor and his precepts volitare per ora virum[204] It is essential to render him in language perfectly plain and unprofessional, and to call him by the name by which he is best and most distinctly known.  The translators of the Bible talk of pence and not denarii, and the admirers of Voltaire do not celebrate him under the name of Arouet.[205]

But, after these trifling complaints are made, one must end, as one began, in unfeigned gratitude to Mr. Long for his excellent and substantial reproduction in English of an invaluable work.  In general the substantiality, soundness, and precision of Mr. Long’s rendering are (I will venture, after all, to give my opinion about them) as conspicuous as the living spirit with which he treats antiquity; and these qualities are particularly desirable in the translator of a work like that of Marcus Aurelius, of which the language is often corrupt, almost always hard and obscure.  Any one who wants to appreciate Mr. Long’s merits as a translator may read, in the original and in Mr. Long’s translation, the seventh chapter of the tenth book; he will see how, through all the dubiousness and involved manner of the Greek, Mr. Long has firmly seized upon the clear thought which is certainly at the bottom of that troubled wording, and, in distinctly rendering this thought, has at the same time thrown round its expression a characteristic shade of painfulness and difficulty which just suits it.  And Marcus Aurelius’s book is one which, when it is rendered so accurately as Mr. Long renders it, even those who know Greek tolerably well may choose to read rather in the translation than in the original.  For not only are the contents here incomparably more valuable than the external form, but this form, the Greek of a Roman, is not exactly one of those styles which have a physiognomy, which are an essential part of their author, which stamp