“Let your rule be the greatest happiness to the greatest number,” interposes another authority. But are men agreed in their definition of “greatest happiness?” Different notions of it are entertained in all ages, amongst every people, by each class. “To the wandering gypsy a home is tiresome, whilst a Swiss is miserable without one. Progress is necessary to the Anglo-Saxons; on the other hand, the Esquimaux are content in their squalid poverty, have no latent wants, and are still what they were in the days of Tacitus. An Irishman delights in a row, a Chinaman in ceremonies and pageantry, and the usually apathetic Javanese gets vociferously enthusiastic over a cock-fight. The heaven of the Hebrew is a city of gold and precious stones, with an abundance of corn and wine; that of the Turk, a harem peopled by Houris; that of the American Indian, a happy hunting-ground; in the Norse paradise there were to be daily battles, with magical healing of wounds. It was, seemingly, the opinion of Lycurgus, that perfect physical development was the chief essential to human felicity; Plotinus, on the contrary, was so purely ideal in his aspirations as to be ashamed of his body. To a miserly Elwes, the hoarding of money was the only enjoyment of life; but the philanthropic Day could find no pleasurable employment, save in its distribution.” Francis, Duke of La Rochefoucault, likened the soul of man unto a medal, so constructed that it may represent either a saint or a devil. Montaigne, also, said the soul of man was double-faced; the inner beamed upon self-love, while the outer wore a mask. Voltaire was a scoffer: a master of satire, who ridiculed without mercy every human weakness. In “Zadig” and “Micromegas” he mocked the ignorance and self-conceit of mankind. His “Memnon,” the “Wise Memnon,” who, in the morning, foreswore all women, made a vow of temperance, renounced gaming and quarreling, and determined never to be seen at court, was, before the night of the same day, cheated and robbed by a female, got drunk, gamed, quarreled with his most intimate friend, and made a visit to court, where everyone laughed at him. The moral of “Candide, or the Optimist,” is, as interpreted by Smollett, that nothing is more absurd than the exercise of human reason; that nothing is more futile and frivolous than the cultivation of philosophy; that mankind are savages, who devour one another. This is cynicism, pure and simple. I cannot endure a creed so ghastly: a philosophy that suspects Socrates of incontinence, charges Epicurus with prodigality, accuses Aristotle of covetousness, and can say of Seneca that “he had but the single virtue of concealing his vices.” Horace took a more charitable view of the moral philosophers, and ascribed their weakness to inability rather than hypocrisy. The poet says that men “upon the stage of this world are like a company of travelers whom night has surprised as they are passing through a forest; they walk on, relying upon the