resemblance of the first, with a frons laeta parum, et dejecto lumina vultu, and the rest that follows, si qua fata aspera rumpas, tu Marcellus eris; but a person of the same stamp and magnitude, who owes nothing to the former, besides the word Roman, and the superstition of reverence, devolving on him by the precedency of eighteen hundred years; one who walks by him with equal paces, and shares the eyes of beholders with him; one who had been first, had he first lived; and, in spite of doating veneration, is still his equal:  both of them born of noble families, in unhappy ages of change and tumult; both of them retiring from affairs of state; yet not leaving the commonwealth, till it had left itself; but never returning to public business, when they had once quitted it, though courted by the heads of either party.  But who would trust the quiet of their lives with the extravagancies of their countrymen, when they are just in the giddiness of their turning; when the ground was tottering under them at every moment; and none could guess whether the next heave of the earthquake would settle them on the first foundation, or swallow it?  Both of them knew mankind exactly well, for both of them began that study in themselves, and there they found the best part of human composition; the worst they learned by long experience of the folly, ignorance, and immorality of most beside them.  Their philosophy, on both sides, was not wholly speculative, for that is barren, and produces nothing but vain ideas of things which cannot possibly be known, or, if they could, yet would only terminate in the understanding; but it was a noble, vigorous and practical philosophy, which exerted itself in all the offices of pity, to those who were unfortunate, and deserved not so to be.  The friend was always more considered by them than the cause; and an Octavius, or an Antony in distress, were relieved by them, as well as a Brutus or a Cassius; for the lowermost party, to a noble mind, is ever the fittest object of good-will.  The eldest of them, I will suppose, for his honour, to have been of the academic sect, neither dogmatist nor stoick; if he were not, I am sure he ought, in common justice, to yield the precedency to his younger brother.  For stiffness of opinion is the effect of pride, and not of philosophy; it is a miserable presumption of that knowledge which human nature is too narrow to contain; and the ruggedness of a stoick is only a silly affectation of being a god,—­to wind himself up by pullies to an insensibility of suffering, and, at the same time, to give the lie to his own experience, by saying he suffers not, what he knows he feels.  True philosophy is certainly of a more pliant nature, and more accommodated to human use; Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto. A wise man will never attempt an impossibility; and such it is to strain himself beyond the nature of his being, either to become a deity, by being above suffering, or to debase himself into a stock or stone,