remarkable; the range it took was immense: it is quite incredible what an amount of knowledge was placed before him, and with what zeal he applied himself to it. As his teacher of rhetoric, he had Fronto, who, at that time, had the greatest reputation as an advocate, and who in his own way was training him to be a rhetorician. He had also a Greek of the same stamp, Herodes Atticus, who was, however, much more a man of the world than the old pedantic Fronto. Marcus Antoninus read a vast deal of the classical literature of the two languages; and until his twentieth year, the whole of his attention was directed to grammar and literature. He had a great liking for the older writers before Cicero, preferring Plautus, Ennius, and Nævius, to Virgil and Horace. Soon afterwards, in his twenty-second year, he became acquainted with a man whom he looked upon as his true guardian angel, sent to him by Heaven. This was Junius Rusticus, of whose personal character we know nothing beyond what M. Antoninus himself says of him in his first book. However inferior Zeno may have been to Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics were the only philosophers at that time who were worth anything: the Platonists had sunk into _Thaumaturgi_ and _Theurgi_; the Peripatetics had fallen to nothing; but the Stoics were ever able to rise again, owing to their moral discipline. That really great man, Epictetus, had already lived and taught. Arrian was likewise a distinguished man; and in his philosophy also, he was worthy of the better ages of Greece. Epictetus infused a new life into the Stoic philosophy; though indeed it was not of long duration, as the minds, which until then had been attached to Stoicism, now turned themselves towards Neo-Platonism and Christianity. Stoicism opened to M. Antoninus a new world; and it is this which gives the otherwise childish letters of Fronto such an indescribable interest: they throw light upon the state of mind of the youth, who cast rhetoric aside in disgust, and sought his only happiness in philosophy, in the insight which it opens into virtue and eternity, and not in its dialectical juggleries. He bore the task of government, just as religious men say that one should take up the cross and bear it. Living wholly for the state and the government, and unremittingly fulfilling his duties as a general, he complains of not being able to conceive one cheering thought. No prince was ever so loved by his subjects, that is to say, by one half of the world, as he was by his: the people of Syria and Egypt are to be excepted, who indeed had never seen him, and were little inclined to him. The whole of the West, on the other hand, adored him: this is shown by the countless busts which are found of him. Men of the same age, as a mark of love, would in those days call each other _frater_; younger ones would call their elders _pater_; and so loveable was he, that all who knew him in the least placed themselves on this affectionate footing with him.