antiquity has bequeathed us few nobler treatises of morals than the "De Officiis" of Cicero, which was avowedly an expansion of a work of Panaetius. It has left us no grander example than that of Epictetus, the sickly, deformed slave of a master who was notorious for his barbarity, enfrancished late in life, but soon driven into exile by Domitian, who, while sounding the very abyss of human misery, and looking forward to death as to simple decomposition, was yet so filled with the sense of the Divine presence, that his life was one continued hymn to Providence, and his writings and his example, which appeared to his contemporaries almost the ideal of human goodness, have not lost their consoling power through all the ages and the vicissitudes they have survived. There was, however, another form of immortality which exercised a much greater influence among the Roman moralists. The desire for reputation, and especially for posthumous reputation--that "last infirmity of noble minds"--assumed an extraordinary prominence among the springs of Roman heroism, and was also the origin of that theatrical and overstrained phraseology which the greatest of ancient moralists rarely escaped. But we should be altogether in error if we inferred, as some have done, that paganism never rose to the conception of virtue concealing itself from the world, and consenting voluntarily to degradation. No characters were more highly appreciated in antiquity than those of men who, through a sense of duty, opposed the strong current of popular favour; of men like Fabius, who consented for the sake of their country to incur the reputation that is most fatal to a soldier; of men like Cato, who remained unmoved among the scoffs, the insults, and the ridicule of an angry crowd. Cicero, expounding the principles of stoicism, declared that no one has attained to true philosophy who has not learnt that all vice should be avoided, "though it were concealed from the eyes of gods and men," and that no deeds are more laudable than those which are done without ostentation, and far from the sight of men. The writings of the Stoics are crowded with sentences to the same effect. "Nothing for opinion, all for conscience." "He who wishes his virtue to be blazed abroad is not labouring for virtue but for fame." "No one is more virtuous than the man who sacrifices the reputation of a good man rather than sacrifice his conscience." "I do not shrink from praise, but I refuse to make it the end and term of right." "If you do anything to please men, you have fallen from your estate." "Even a bad reputation nobly earned is pleasing." "A great man is not the less great when he lies vanquished and prostrate in the dust." "Never forget that it is possible to be at once a divine man, yet a man unknown to all the world." "That which is beautiful is beautiful in itself; the praise of man adds nothing to its quality." Marcus Aurelius, following an example