“’Twould be long,” he says, “to track them all out—those whose life draughts, or ball-playing, or the practice of carefully cooking their flesh in the sun, has caused to waste away. They are not exactly lazy people, since their pleasures give them a great deal of trouble. For nobody can doubt that they make much ado about nothing, who are detained by the study of useless letters—there is a considerable company of them among us Romans. It has been a mania of the Greeks to inquire how many rowers Ulysses had, whether the _Iliad_ was written earlier than the _Odyssey_, further, whether the two are by the same author, and other matters of the same stamp, which, if you keep to yourself, they will not help your silent conscience, while, if you talk about them, you will seem not more learned but only more of a bore.” The rest of the chapter draws up a long list of similar enormities of curiosity—historical and literary. “Who had the first naval triumph?” &c. Seneca even ironically supplies questions of the kind, and information about them, to those who like such things. Elsewhere in the 88th (the third of the thirteenth book)[313] of those not disagreeable epistles which he composed for the edification of a man of straw called Lucilius, and for the display of his own ability, he supposes the definite question to be put to him, “What do you think of liberal studies?” and he goes off at score in the true style of the Stoic pulpit. He respects none, counts none as good. They are all very well as exercises, as preparations; you may stick to them as long as you can do nothing better. They are called “liberal,” as worthy of a free man: but there is only one study worthy of a freeman (does one not hear the very drone of the ancestor of Mr Chadband?), and that is the study of WISDOM. All else is petty and puerile: it has nothing to do with making a GOOD man. Will the grammarian, who, if he does not stick to mere philology, goes to history or, at farthest, to poetry, be a road-maker for us to VIRTUE, my brethren? Will syntax and prosody banish fear, quench cupidity, bridle lust? And so forth. He makes, indeed, not bad fun of the attempts to make out Homer now a Stoic, now an Epicurean, now a Peripatetic. But he soon relapses into the “chaff and draff” of the conventional moralists at all times. What are the tempests that impelled Ulysses to the storms of the mind? What does it matter whether Penelope was chaste? Teach me what Chastity _is_. _Et patati et patata._ From a man in this frame of mind comes no good critical thing; though we certainly should like to have heard from the Tragedian, whoever he was, what put into his head the idea of that remarkable compromise between Classic and Romantic Tragedy which gave us the Latin _Hippolytus_ and the _Octavia_. Footnote 313: Ed. cit., iii. 246 _sq._