Perhaps the most ambitious of the essays, and those on which the author bestowed most of his skill and attention, are "The Epicurean," "The Stoic," "The Sceptic," and "The Platonist." These are productions of the imagination, suggested apparently by the style and method of _The Spectator_. There is no attempt either to support or to attack the systems represented by the names of the essays, nor is there a description or definition of them; but on each occasion a member of one of these celebrated schools speaks in his own person, and describes the nature of the satisfaction that he finds in his own code of philosophy, as a solution of the great difficulty of the right rule of thought and action. "The Epicurean" takes a flight of imagination beyond that of Hume's other works. It departs from the cold atmosphere of philosophy, and desires to fascinate as well as enlighten. But though it possesses all the marks of a fine intellect, the reader is apt to feel how far more sweetly and gracefully the subject would have been handled by Addison, to whose department of literature it seems rightly to belong. The follower of Epicurus is not represented, as indulging in that gross licentiousness, as wallowing in that disgusting "stye" which the representations of Diogenes Laertius, and others, have impressed on the vulgar associations with the name of that master. On the other hand, the picture is far from embodying what many maintain to be the fundamental precept of Epicurus, that happiness being the great end sought by man, the proper method of reaching it is by the just regulation of the passions and propensities; a precept embodied in the "Sperne voluptates. Nocet empta dolere voluptas." Hume, who was not correcting errors, or instructing his readers in the true meaning of terms, or appreciation of characters, draws in "The Epicurean" a picture of one who is not gross or grovelling in his pleasures, and who restrains himself lest he should outrun enjoyment; but whose ruling principle is still that of the voluptuary.