Seneca, for instance, whose insight was as clear and whose understanding was as unclouded as any writer with whom the world is acquainted, sent his letters down the centuries freighted with such ideas as these: "Death is nature's most admirable invention." "There is no need to complain of particular grievances, for life in its entirety is lamentable." "No one would accept life were it not received in ignorance of what it is." Pliny, also, is very quotable. "Nature's most pleasing invention," he says, "is brevity of life." And he adds, "No mortal is happy, for even if there is no other cause for discontent there is at least the fear of possible misfortune." Then, too, Petronius, the poet of the Roman orgy, opening and closing his veins, toying with death, as with a last and supreme delight, is of familiar, if repulsive, memory. English literature is naturally as well stocked with individual expressions of distaste for existence as that of Rome. The poets, nearly one and all, from Chaucer to Rossetti, have told their sorrow in a variety of more or less polished metre, and even Macpherson was careful, in dowering his century with another bard, to put thoughts into Ossian's verse which would not have been unfitting in a Greek chorus. In speaking of the world, Chaucer had already said,-- "Here is no home, here is but a wilderness," when Sir Thomas Wyatt, enlarging on the theme, repeated,-- "Wherefore come death and let me dye." The delicate muse of Samuel Fletcher found-- "Nothing's so dainty sweet, as lovely melancholy," and Shakespeare's depressing lines on the value of life are familiar to every schoolboy. Dryden wrote,-- "When I consider life, 't is all a cheat; Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit, Trust on and think to-morrow will repay; To-morrow's falser than the former day." All of which was afterwards summed up in the well-known line,-- "Man never _is_ but always _to be_ blessed," while Thomson noted-- ... "all the thousand, nameless ills That one incessant struggle render life." Keats, and especially Byron, wrote stanza after stanza of enervating sadness. Moore's dear gazelle is nowadays a familiar comparison. Shelley's tremulous sensibility forbade his finding any charm in life, and we none of us need to be reminded that Poe's soul was sorrow-laden. But the poets are not alone in their tale of the deceptions of life; the moralists and essayists, too, have added their quota to the general budget, and it is not simply the value of life that has been questioned by many of the best writers; there has been also a certain surprise expressed that man should care to live at all. Indeed, the "I see no necessity" of the wit, to the beggar imploring aid that he might live, is the epigram of the thoughts of a hundred scholars.