Stoic optimism can scarcely be said to have solved the mysteries of evil and the unrest of the soul, or satisfied the craving for happiness, for guidance and support which is deep down in every heart. Yet the followers of that school were a good influence on a corrupt world. We feel in all the book of the Meditations a calm strength, a forbearance, a perseverance despite failure in good resolutions, which does all honour to its author living in the most sensual surroundings. And in Marcus this stern character is relieved by touches of tender affection and gratitude constantly recurring. They reveal a character far inferior to that of the Christian Saint; nobody except some of our neo-pagan paradoxists will look for such perfection in him; the marvel is that he so often reminds us of them and approaches them even afar. In none of those pagan heroes do we find that blending of strength and humility, of austerity and gentlest love, that touch of the Light Divine and that reflex of Christ, which remove a St. Francis de Sales or a St. Vincent de Paul a whole heaven’s breadth from them and make it an irreverence to compare the one to the other. But we do find wonderful things in them. Take, for instance, the nine considerations which Marcus proposed for himself as an aid to bearing with those who had offended him; they are given in the eleventh book, and the second of them well shows the imperfection inseparable from pagan virtue, even the highest: (1) All men are born for one another. (2) Consider the private vices of those that have offended thee. (3) If they do wrong it is involuntarily and in ignorance. (4) Thou also doest many things wrong, and thou art a man like others; and even if thou dost abstain from certain faults still thou hast the disposition to commit them, though either through cowardice or concern about reputation or some such mean motive thou dost abstain from such faults. (5) You may be judging them rashly. (6) “Man’s life is only a moment, and after a short time we are all laid out dead.” (7) Your annoyance is due not to those acts but to your own impressions. (He says elsewhere: “How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquillity.”) (8) Anger and vexation are a greater evil than the thing which causes them. (9) One of the most amiable passages in the Meditations: “Consider that benevolence is invincible if it be genuine, and not an affected smile and acting a part. For what will the most violent man do to thee if thou continuest to be of a benevolent disposition towards him, and if, as opportunity offers, thou gently admonishest him and calmly correctest his errors at the very time when he is trying to do thee harm, saying, Not so, my child: we are constituted by nature for something else: I shall certainly not be injured, but thou art injuring thyself, my child--and show him with gentle tact and by general