Well, Lucian's moralizings are, for those who like such things, of the right quality; they are never dull, and the touch is extremely light. We may perhaps be pardoned for alluding to half a dozen conceptions that have a specially modern air about them. The use that Rome may serve as a school of resistance to temptation (_Nigrinus_, 19) recalls Milton's 'fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary.' 'Old age is wisdom's youth, the day of her glorious flower' (_Heracles_, 8) might have stood as a text for Browning's _Rabbi ben Ezra_. The brands visible on the tyrant's soul, and the refusal of Lethe as a sufficient punishment (_Voyage to the lower World_, 24 and 28), have their parallels in our new eschatology. The decision of _Zeus_ that _Heraclitus_ and _Democritus_ are to be one lot that laughter and tears will go together (_Sale of Creeds_, l3)—accords with our views of the emotional temperament. _Chiron_ is impressive on the vanity of fruition (_Dialogues of the Dead_, 26). And the figuring of _Truth_ as 'the shadowy creature with the indefinite complexion' (_The Fisher_, 16) is only one example of Lucian's felicity in allegory. Another weak point, for which many people will have no more inclination to condemn him than for his moralizing, is his absolute indifference to the beauties of nature. Having already given him credit for regarding nothing that is human as beyond his province, it is our duty to record the corresponding limitation; of everything that was not human he was simply unconscious; with him it was not so much that the _proper_ as that the _only_ study of mankind is man. The apparent exceptions are not real ones. If he is interested in the gods, it is as the creatures of human folly that he takes them to be. If he writes a toy essay with much parade of close observation on the fly, it is to show how amusing human ingenuity can be on an unlikely subject. But it is worth notice that 'the first of the moderns,' though he shows himself in many descriptions of pictures quite awake to the beauty manufactured by man, has in no way anticipated the modern discovery that nature is beautiful. To readers who have had enough of the pathetic fallacy, and of the second-rate novelist's local colour, Lucian's tacit assumption that there is nothing but man is refreshing. That he was a close enough observer of human nature, any one can satisfy himself by glancing at the _Feast of Lapithae_, the _Dialogues of the Hetaerae_, some of the _Dialogues of the Gods_, and perhaps best of all, _The Liar_.