When he is invited to a wedding, he takes the opportunity to rail at the fair sex. If he meets a friend who has just come home from a long journey, he’ll press him to take a walk. He is ever ready and punctual, as soon as a shop-keeper has sold his goods, to help him to a customer that would have given more. If he happens to be in a place where a servant is chastised, all the comfort he gives him is to tell him that he also had formerly a boy whom he chastised in the same manner, and that the poor lad so resented this usage that he immediately made way with himself. If he is accidentally present at an arbitration, where the contending parties desire to have the matter in dispute between them amicably settled, instead of promoting a reconciliation, he sets them together by the ears, and makes the difference ten times greater than it was before.”—GALLY. =The Stoic School= was so called from the Painted Portico (_stoa_) at Athens, where its founder ZENO, the Cyprian, taught for fifty-eight years (318-260 B.C.). It was based on high moral principles, but was not free from errors. Duty was all in this philosophy; virtue alone, happiness. Mastery of self, contempt alike for pleasure and pain, were leading doctrines. Fate governed the world, even God himself. Yet Zeno did not allow this doctrine to excuse shortcomings or interfere with individual responsibility. When his slave, detected in theft, besought exemption from chastisement on the plea that it was fated for him to steal, he replied, “Yes, and it was also fated for you to be flogged.” Suicide, in Zeno’s creed, was justifiable when a man had outlived his usefulness, and the great philosopher practised as he preached; for, having received a severe fall at the age of ninety-eight, he quietly remarked, “I obey the summons,” and went and hanged himself. Zeno enjoyed public confidence at home as well as the respect of foreign princes; among his disciples were enrolled some of the greatest men of Greece and Rome. Nothing remains of his writings. =The Cynics= derived their name from the gymnasium of _Cyn_osarges, near the Lyceum, where they gathered to listen to Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates. This extremist perverted his master’s theory of virtue, which he made to consist in a comfortless life, a renunciation of pleasure, and a contemptuous and even shameless independence of manners. Yet Socrates saw pride even through the holes of Antisthenes’ shabby robe. Antisthenes was not much in metaphysics. He was puzzled by abstract generalizations, and to Plato’s Idealism opposed an uncompromising Realism. “Plato,” he said, “I can see a horse, and I can see a man, but horsehood and manhood I cannot see.”—“True,” replied Plato, “you have the eye that can see a horse and a man; but the eye which can see horsehood and manhood you lack.”