appear somewhat obscure; but those things which seemed to be discussed with more subtlety than is necessary in words, may be illustrated by the lives and actions of the greatest of men. I ask then of you, whether the men who left to us this empire, founded upon so noble a system, seem ever to have thought of gratifying avarice by money; delight by delicacy; luxury by magnificence; or pleasure by feasting? Set before your eyes any one of our monarchs. Shall I begin with Romulus? Or, after the state was free, with those who liberated it? By what steps then did Romulus ascend to heaven? By those which these people term good things? Or by his exploits and his virtues? What! are we to imagine, that the wooden or earthen dishes of Numa Pompilius were less acceptable to the immortal gods, than the embossed plate of others? I pass over our other kings, for all of them, excepting Tarquin the Proud, were equally excellent. Should any one ask, What did Brutus perform when he delivered his country? Or, as to those who were the participators of that design, what was their aim, and the object of their pursuit? Lives there the man who can regard as their object, riches, pleasure, or anything else than acting the part of a great and a gallant man? What motive impelled Caius Mucius, without the least hope of preservation, to attempt the death of Porsenna? What impulse kept Cocles to the bridge, singly opposed to the whole force of the enemy? ? What power devoted the elder and the younger Decius, and impelled them against armed battalions of enemies? What was the object of the continence of Caius Fabricius, or of the frugality of life of Manius Curius? What were the motives of those two thunderbolts of the Punic war, Publius and Cueius Scipio, when they proposed with their own bodies to intercept the progress of ⚫ Horace develops the same thought. In commending decision of character, he writes : Hac arte Pollux et vagus Hercules Enisus arces attigit igneas: Quos inter Augustus recumbens Hac te merentem, Bacche pater, tuæ Vexere tigres indocili jugum Collo trahentes: hac Quirinus Martis equis Acheronta fugit.-Carm, lib. iii, carm. 3. the Carthaginians? What did the elder, what did the younger Africanus propose? What were the views of Cato, who lived between the times of both? What shall I say of innumerable other instances; for we abound in examples drawn from our own history; can we think that they proposed any other object in life but what seemed glorious and noble? Now let the deriders of this sentiment and principle come forward; let even them take their choice, whether they would rather resemble the man who is rich in marble palaces, adorned with ivory, and shining with gold, in statues, in pictures, in embossed gold and silver plate, in the workmanship of Corinthian brass, or if they will resemble Fabricius, who had, and who wished to have, none of these things. And yet they are readily prevailed upon to admit that those things which are transferred, now hither, now thither, are not to be ranked among good things, while at the same time they strongly maintain, and eagerly dispute, that pleasure is the highest good; a sentiment that to me seems to be that of a brute, rather than that of a man.* Shall you, endowed as you are by God or by nature, whom we may term the mother of all That pleasure is man's chiefest good (because indeed it is the percep tion of good that is properly pleasure), is an assertion most certainly true, though under the common acceptance of it not only false but odious: for, according to this, pleasure and sensuality pass for terms equivalent; and therefore he that takes it in this sense alters the subject of the discourse. Sensuality is indeed a part, or rather one kind of pleasure, such an one as it is; for pleasure in general is the consequent apprehension of a suitable object, suitably applied to a rightly disposed faculty; and so must be conversant both about the faculties of the body and of the soul respectively; as being the result of the functions belonging to both. "Since God never created any faculty either in soul or body, but withal prepared for it a suitable object, and that in order to its gratification; can we think that religion was designed only for a contradiction to nature? And, with the greatest and most irrational tyranny in the world, to tantalize and tie men up from enjoyment, in the midst of all the opportunities of enjoyment? To place men with the furious affections of hunger and thirst in the very bosom of plenty, and then to tell them that the envy of Providence has sealed up everything that is suitable under the character of unlawful? For certainly, first to frame appetites fit to receive pleasure, and then to interdict them with a "touch not, taste not," can be nothing else than only to give them occasion to devour and prey upon themselves, and so to keep men under the perpetual torment of an unsatisfied desire; a thing hugely contrary to the natural felicity of the creature, and consequently to the wisdom and goodness of the great Creator. There is no doubt but a man, while he resigns himself up to the brutish guidance of things, with a soul (than which there exists nothing more excellent and more divine), so degrade and prostrate yourself as to think there is no difference between yourself and any quadruped? Is there any real good that does not make him who possesses it a better man? For in proportion as every man has the greatest amount of excellence, he is also in that proportion most praiseworthy; nor is there any excellence on which the man who possesses it may not justly value himself. But what of these qualities resides in pleasure? Does it make a man better, or more praiseworthy? Does any man extol himself in boasting or self-recommendation for having enjoyed pleasures? Now if pleasure, which is defended by the advocacy of many, is not to be ranked among good things, and if the greater it is the more it dislodges the mind from its habitual and settled position; surely to live well and happily, is nothing else than to live virtuously and rightly.† * sense and appetite, has no relish at all for the spiritual, refined delights of a soul clarified by grace and virtue. The pleasures of an angel can never be the pleasures of a hog. But this is the thing that we contend for, that a man, having once advanced himself to a state of superiority over the control of his inferior appetites, finds an infinitely more solid and sublime pleasure in the delights proper to his reason, than the same person had ever conveyed to him by the bare ministry of his senses."--South's Sermons, Vol. I. Sermon 1. "All pleasures that affect the body must needs weary, because they transport; and all transportation is a violence, and no violence can be lasting, but determines upon the falling of the spirits, which are not able to keep up that height of motion that the pleasures of the senses raise them to; and therefore, how inevitably does an immoderate laughter end in a But sigh? which only nature's recovering itself after a force done to it. the religious pleasure of a well-disposed mind moves gently, and therefore constantly; it does not affect by rapture and ecstasy; but is like the pleasure of health, which is still and sober, yet greater and stronger than those that call up the senses with grosser and more affecting impressions. God has given no man a body as strong as his appetites; but has corrected the boundlessness of his voluptuous desires by stinting his strength and contracting his capacities."-Ibid. "And now, upon the result of all, I suppose that to exhort men to be religious is only in other words to exhort them to take their pleasure. A pleasure high, rational, and angelical; a pleasure, embased with no appendant sting, no consequent loathing, no remorses, or bitter farewells; but such an one as, being honey in the mouth, never turns to gall or gravel in the belly. A pleasure made for the soul, and the soul for that; suitable to its spirituality, and equal to all its capacities. Such an one as grows fresher upon enjoyment, and though continually fed upon, yet is never PARADOX II. A MAN WHO IS VIRTUOUS IS DESTITUTE OF NO REQUISITE OF A HAPPY LIFE. NEVER, for my part, did I imagine Marcus Regulus to have been distressed, or unhappy, or wretched; because his magnanimity was not tortured by the Carthaginians; nor was the weight of his authority; nor was his honour; nor was his resolution; nor was one of his virtues; nor, in short, did his soul suffer their torments, for a soul with the guard and retinue of so many virtues, never surely could be taken, though his body was made captive. We have seen devoured. A pleasure that a man may call as properly his own as his soul and his conscience; neither liable to accident, nor exposed to injury. It is the foretaste of heaven, and the earnest of eternity. In a word, it is such an one, as being begun in grace passes into glory, blessedness, and immortality, and those pleasures that neither eye has seen, nor car heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man to conceive.'"-South's Sermons, Vol. i. Sermon I. *The sect of ancient philosophers that boasted to have carried this necessary science to the highest perfection were the Stoies, or scholars of Zeno, whose wild enthusiastic virtue pretended to an exemption from the sensibilities of unenlightened mortals, and who proclaimed themselves exalted, by the doctrines of their sect, above the reach of those miseries which embitter life to the rest of the world. They therefore removed pain, poverty, loss of friends, exile, and violent death, from the catalogue of evils; and passed, in their haughty style, a kind of irreversible decree, by which they forbade them to be counted any longer among the objects of terror or anxiety, or to give any disturbance to the tranquillity of a wise man. "This edict was, I think, not universally observed; for though one of the more resolute, when he was tortured by a violent disease, cried out that let pain harass him to its utmost power, it should never force him to consider it as other than indifferent and neutral; yet all had not stubbornness to hold out against their senses; for a weaker pupil of Zeno is recorded to have confessed, in the anguish of the gout, that he now found pain to be an evil. "It may, however, be questioned, whether these philosophers can be very properly numbered among the teachers of patience; for if pain be not an evil, there seems no instruction requisite how it may be borne; and, therefore, when they endeavour to arm their followers with arguments against it, they may be thought to have given up their first position. But such inconsistencies are to be expected from the greatest understandings, when they endeavour to grow eminent by singularity, and employ their strength in establishing opinions opposite to nature. The controversy about the reality of external evils is now at an end. That life has many miseries, and that those miseries are, sometimes at least, equal to all the powers of Caius Marius; he, in my opinion, was in prosperity one of the happiest, and in adversity one of the greatest of ment than which man can have no happier lot. Thou knowest not, foolish man, thou knowest not what power virtue possesses; thou only usurpest the name of virtue; thou art a stranger to her influence. No man who is wholly consistent within himself, and who reposes all his interests in himself alone, can be otherwise than completely happy.* But the man whose every hope, and scheme, and design depends upon fortune, such a man can have no certainty ;— can possess nothing assured to him as destined to continue for a single day. If you have any such man in your power, you may terrify him by threats of death or exile; but whatever can happen to me in so ungrateful a country, will find me not only not opposing, but even not refusing it. Το what purpose have I toiled? to what purpose have I acted? or on what have my cares and meditations been watchfully employed, if I have produced and arrived at no such result, as that neither the outrages of fortune nor the injuries of enemies can shatter me. Do you threaten me with death,† which is separating me from mankind? Or with exile, fortitude, is now universally confessed; and therefore, it is useful to consider not only how we may escape them, but by what means those which either the accidents of affairs, or the infirmities of nature, must bring upon us, may be mitigated and lightened, and how we may make those hours less wretched, which the condition of our present existence will not allow to be very happy."-Dr. Johnson, Rambler, No. 32. There is nothing that can raise a man to that generous absoluteness of condition, as neither to cringe, to fawn, or to depend meanly; but that which gives him that happiness within himself for which men depend upon others. For surely I need salute no great man's threshold, sneak to none of his friends or servants, to speak a good word for me to my conscience. It is a noble and a sure defiance of a great malice, backed with a great interest, which yet can have no advantage of a man, but from his own expectations of something that is without himself. But if I can make my duty my delight; if I can feast, and please, and caress my mind, with the pleasures of worthy speculations or vituous practices; let greatness and malice vex and abridge me, if they can; my pleasures are as free as my will, no more to be controlled than my choice, or the unlimited range of my thoughts and my desires."-- South's Sermons, Vol. I., Sermon 1. To be understood as addressed to Anthony. Virgil has a similar idea : "Breve et irreparabile tempus, Omnibus est vitæ, sed faman extendere factis |