By the method of placing in continuous order certain common and well-known indications, we have endeavoured to illustrate the view that the natural development of Greek Philosophy led in the direction of Ethics, and that the natural development of Ethics led in the direction of a popular scheme of conduct, which, fragmentary and incomplete as it might be in a scientific sense, had yet the advantage that it was founded upon the common daily life of the ordinary man, and placed before the ordinary man in his common daily life an ideal of virtue which, by efforts not beyond his strength, he might realize and maintain. This type of character, partly the growth of the circumstances of the time, but strengthened and expanded by the manner in which Epicureanism adapted itself to those circumstances, reacted upon the sterner conception of the Stoic ideal of private virtue, and when we reach the revival of Religion and Philosophy in the Græco-Roman world of the Empire, it is this ideal which is the aim and end of every philosopher from Seneca to Marcus Aurelius, from Plutarch to Apuleius, no matter what the particular label they may attach to their doctrines to indicate their formal adhesion to one of the great classical schools.[94] To take an extreme example of a truth which will subsequently be illustrated from Plutarch, Seneca, who is a Stoic of the Stoics, is full of praise for the noble and humane simplicity of the Epicurean ideal of life, and in those inspiring letters through which he directs the conscience of his friend Lucilius into the pure and pleasant ways of truth and virtue, it is an exceptional occurrence for him to conclude one of his moral lessons without quoting in its support the authority of the Master of the Garden. The absorbing interest of Plutarch as a moral philosopher lies mainly in the fact that though, as a polemical writer, he is an opponent, and not always a fair or judicious opponent, both of the Porch and the Garden,[95] he collects from any quarter any kind of teaching which he hopes to find useful in inculcating that ideal of conduct which he believes most likely to work out into virtue and happiness; and though his most revered teacher is Plato, the ideal of conduct which he inculcates is one which Epicurus would have wished his friend Metrodorus to appropriate and exemplify.[96] This ideal Plutarch thought worth preservation; it is the last intelligible and practicable ideal presented to us by Paganism; and the attempts which Plutarch made to preserve it are interesting as those of a man who stood at a crisis in the world’s history, and endeavoured to find, in the wisdom and strength and splendour of the Past, a sanction for purity and goodness, when a sanction for purity and goodness was being mysteriously formed, in comparison with which the wisdom and strength and splendour of the Past were to be regarded but as weakness and darkness and folly. The experiment was not without