The same unphilosophical guest, who had asserted that death was a disadvantage, and whom Cicero, in charity to his memory, does not name, is doomed, in the second dialogue, _De Tolerando Dolore_, to announce the still more untenable proposition, that pain is an evil. But Cicero demonstrated, that its sufferings may be overcome, not by remembrance of the silly Epicurean maxims,—“Short if severe, and light if long,” but by fortitude and patience; and he accordingly censures those philosophers, who have represented pain in too formidable colours, and reproaches those poets, who have described their heroes as yielding to its influence. In the third book, _De Ægritudine Lenienda_, the author treats of the best alleviations of sorrow. To foresee calamities, and be prepared for them, is either to repel their assaults, or to mitigate their severity. After they have occurred, we ought to remember, that grieving is a folly which cannot avail us, and that misfortunes are not peculiar to ourselves, but are the common lot of humanity. The sorrow of which Cicero here treats, seems chiefly that occasioned by deprivation of friends and relatives, to which the recent loss of his daughter Tullia, and the composition of his treatise _De Consolatione_, had probably directed his attention. The fourth book treats _De Reliquis animi Perturbationibus_, including all those passions and vexations, which the author considers as diseases of the soul. These he classes and defines—pointing out, at the same time, the remedy or relief appropriate to each disquietude. In the fifth book, in which he attempts to prove that virtue alone is sufficient for perfect felicity—_Virtutem ad beate vivendum se ipsâ esse contentam_—he coincides more completely with the opinions of the Stoics, than in his work _De Finibus_, where he seems to assent, to the Peripatetic doctrine, “that though virtue be the chief good, the perfection of the other qualities of nature enters into the composition of supreme happiness.” In these Tusculan Disputations, which treat of the subjects most important and subservient to the happiness of life, the whole discourse is in the mouth of Tully himself;—the Auditor, whose initial letter some editors have whimsically mistaken for that of Atticus, being a mere man of straw. He is set up to announce what is to be represented as an untenable proposition: but after this duty is performed, no English hearer or Welsh uncle could have listened with less dissent and interruption. The great object of Cicero’s continued lectures, is by fortifying the mind with practical and philosophical lessons, adapted to the circumstances of life, to elevate us above the influence of all its passions and pains.