an indelible impression of him on the reader’s mind.  An old Lyons commentator finds, indeed, in Marcus Aurelius’s Greek, something characteristic, something specially firm and imperial; but I think an ordinary mortal will hardly find this:  he will find crabbed Greek, without any great charm of distinct physiognomy.  The Greek of Thucydides and Plato has this charm, and he who reads them in a translation, however accurate, loses it, and loses much in losing it; but the Greek of Marcus Aurelius, like the Greek of the New Testament, and even more than the Greek of the New Testament, is wanting in it.  If one could be assured that the English Testament were made perfectly accurate, one might be almost content never to open a Greek Testament again; and, Mr. Long’s version of Marcus Aurelius being what it is, an Englishman who reads to live, and does not live to read, may henceforth let the Greek original repose upon its shelf.

The man whose thoughts Mr. Long has thus faithfully reproduced, is perhaps the most beautiful figure in history.  He is one of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks, which stand forever to remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and perseverance have once been carried, and may be carried again.  The interest of mankind is peculiarly attracted by examples of signal goodness in high places; for that testimony to the worth of goodness is the most striking which is borne by those to whom all the means of pleasure and self-indulgence lay open, by those who had at their command the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.  Marcus Aurelius was the ruler of the grandest of empires; and he was one of the best of men.  Besides him, history presents one or two sovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred.  But Marcus Aurelius has, for us moderns, this great superiority in interest over Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of society modern by its essential characteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant centre of civilization.  Trajan talks of “our enlightened age” just as glibly as the Times[206] talks of it.  Marcus Aurelius thus becomes for us a man like ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are.  Saint Louis[207] inhabits an atmosphere of mediaeval Catholicism, which the man of the nineteenth century may admire, indeed, may even passionately wish to inhabit, but which, strive as he will, he cannot really inhabit.  Alfred belongs to a state of society (I say it with all deference to the Saturday Review[208] critic who keeps such jealous watch over the honor of our Saxon ancestors) half barbarous.  Neither Alfred nor Saint Louis can be morally and intellectually as near to us as Marcus Aurelius.