Of the outward life and circumstances of Marcus Aurelius, beyond these notices which he has himself supplied, there are few of much interest and importance.  There is the fine anecdote of his speech when he heard of the assassination of the revolted Avidius Cassius,[213] against whom he was marching; he was sorry, he said, to be deprived of the pleasure of pardoning him.  And there are one or two more anecdotes of him which show the same spirit.  But the great record for the outward life of a man who has left such a record of his lofty inward aspirations as that which Marcus Aurelius has left, is the clear consenting voice of all his contemporaries,—­high and low, friend and enemy, pagan and Christian,—­in praise of his sincerity, justice, and goodness.  The world’s charity does not err on the side of excess, and here was a man occupying the most conspicuous station in the world, and professing the highest possible standard of conduct;—­yet the world was obliged to declare that he walked worthily of his profession.  Long after his death, his bust was to be seen in the houses of private men through the wide Roman empire.  It may be the vulgar part of human nature which busies itself with the semblance and doings of living sovereigns, it is its nobler part which busies itself with those of the dead; these busts of Marcus Aurelius, in the homes of Gaul, Britain, and Italy, bear witness, not to the inmates’ frivolous curiosity about princes and palaces, but to their reverential memory of the passage of a great man upon the earth.

Two things, however, before one turns from the outward to the inward life of Marcus Aurelius, force themselves upon one’s notice, and demand a word of comment; he persecuted the Christians, and he had for his son the vicious and brutal Commodus.[214] The persecution at Lyons, in which Attalus[215] and Pothinus suffered, the persecution at Smyrna, in which Polycarp[216] suffered, took place in his reign.  Of his humanity, of his tolerance, of his horror of cruelty and violence, of his wish to refrain from severe measures against the Christians, of his anxiety to temper the severity of these measures when they appeared to him indispensable, there is no doubt:  but, on the one hand, it is certain that the letter, attributed to him, directing that no Christian should be punished for being a Christian, is spurious; it is almost certain that his alleged answer to the authorities of Lyons, in which he directs that Christians persisting in their profession shall be dealt with according to law, is genuine.  Mr. Long seems inclined to try and throw doubt over the persecution at Lyons, by pointing out that the letter of the Lyons Christians relating it, alleges it to have been attended by miraculous and incredible incidents.  “A man,” he says, “can only act consistently by accepting all this letter or rejecting it all, and we cannot blame him for either.”  But it is contrary to all experience to say that because