Pliny’s character, as displayed in his Letters, is the embodiment of the finest moral tone of the great age which had opened when he died, in kindlier or juster treatment of the slave, in high respect for women, in conscientious care for the education of the young, in beneficent provision for the helpless and distressed. But it would be a mistaken view to regard these ideas as an altogether new departure. It is dangerous to assert that anything is altogether new in Roman social history. The truth is that the moral sentiment in which these movements took their rise had been for generations in the air. It was diffused by the Stoic preaching of the brotherhood and equality of men as fellow-citizens of one great commonwealth. The duty of redeeming the captive and succouring the poor had been preached by Cicero a century and a half before Pliny’s Letters appeared.(1081) Horace had, a few years later, asked the searching question, “Why should the worthy be in want while you have wealth?”(1082) Seneca preaches, with the unction of an evangelist, all the doctrines on which the humane legislation of the Antonine age was founded, all the principles of humanity and charity of every age. He asserts the natural equality of bond and free, and the claim of the slave to kindness and consideration.(1083) He brands in many a passage the cruelty and contempt of the slaveholder. He preaches tolerance of the froward, forgiveness of insult and injury.(1084) He enforces the duty of universal kindness and helpfulness by the example of God, who is bounteous and merciful even to the evildoer.(1085) Juvenal was little of a philosopher, but he had unconsciously drunk deep of the gospel of philosophy. Behind all his bitter pessimism there is a pure and lofty moral tone which sometimes almost approaches the ideal of charity in S. Paul. The slave whom we torture or insult for some slight negligence is of the same elements as we are.(1086) The purity of childhood is not to be defiled by the ribaldry of the banquet and the example of a mother’s intrigues or a father’s brutal excesses.(1087) Revenge is the pleasure of a puny soul.(1088) The guilty may be left to the scourge of the unseen inquisitor. Juvenal regards the power of sympathy for any human grief or pain as the priceless gift of Nature, “who has given us tears.”(1089) It is by her command that we mourn the calamity of a friend or the death of the babe “too small for the funeral pyre.” The scenes of suffering and pity which the satirist has sketched in some tender lines were assuredly not imaginary pictures. We are apt to forget, in our modern self-complacency, that, at least among civilised races, human nature in its broad features remains pretty much the same from age to age. On an obscure epitaph of this period you may read the words—_Bene fac, hoc tecum feres._(1090) Any one who knows the inscriptions may be inclined to doubt whether private benefactions under