[Greek:  Para Sextou—­ten ennoian tou kata physinzen, kai to semnon aplastos,—­ose kolakeias men pases proseneseran einai ten omilian autou, aidesimotaton de par’ auton ekeinon ton kairon einai kai ama men apathesaton einai, ama de philosorgotaton kai to idein aithropon saphos elachison ton eautou kalon hegoumenon ten autou polymathien].

     M. ANTONINUS.[25]

[25] L. i. 9.  But the passage is made up from, rather than found in, Antoninus.  Ed. of Friend.

From Sextus, and from the contemplation of his character, I learned what it was to live a life in harmony with nature; and that seemliness and dignity of deportment, which insured the profoundest reverence at the very same time that his company was more winning than all the flattery in the world.  To him I owe likewise that I have known a man at once the most dispassionate and the most affectionate, and who of all his attractions set the least value on the multiplicity of his literary acquisitions.

To the Editor of ’The Friend.’

SIR,

I hope you will not ascribe to presumption the liberty I take in addressing you on the subject of your work.  I feel deeply interested in the cause you have undertaken to support; and my object in writing this letter is to describe to you, in part from my own feelings, what I conceive to be the state of many minds, which may derive important advantage from your instructions.

I speak, Sir, of those who, though bred up under our unfavourable system of education, have yet held at times some intercourse with nature, and with those great minds whose works have been moulded by the spirit of nature; who, therefore, when they pass from the seclusion and constraint of early study, bring with them into the new scene of the world much of the pure sensibility which is the spring of all that is greatly good in thought and action.  To such the season of that entrance into the world is a season of fearful importance; not for the seduction of its passions, but of its opinions.  Whatever be their intellectual powers, unless extraordinary circumstances in their lives have been so favourable to the growth of meditative genius, that their speculative opinions must spring out of their early feelings, their minds are still at the mercy of fortune:  they have no inward impulse steadily to propel them:  and must trust to the chances of the world for a guide.  And such is our present moral and intellectual state, that these chances are little else than variety of danger.  There will be a thousand causes conspiring to complete the work of a false education, and by inclosing the mind on every side from the influences of natural feeling, to degrade its inborn dignity, and finally bring the heart itself under subjection to a corrupted understanding.  I am anxious to describe to you what I have experienced or seen of the dispositions and feelings that will aid every other cause of danger, and tend to lay the mind open to the infection of all those falsehoods in opinion and sentiment, which constitute the degeneracy of the age.