about twelve million dollars of our money. This wealth finally excited the envy of Nero, and Seneca, to avoid danger, shrewdly offered to refund the imperial gifts, and retire on a small allowance. Nero declined this, and Seneca, under pretense of illness, shut himself up, and ceased to appear in public. Nero now made an ineffectual effort to have him poisoned. This failing, he soon managed to connect him with Piso's conspiracy, under which Lucan was also condemned. An accusation was quite enough to fix Seneca's guilt. He was condemned to put himself to death. His noble wife, Pauli'na, determined to die with him, but was prevented by the emperor; and the old philosopher was suffocated by the vapors of a stove, after vainly seeking death through bleeding and poison. He died in the year 65 A.D.

As a man Seneca was not insincere, but he lacked the firmness to live up to his own standard. He was avaricious, and retained his influence over Nero by base expedients; yet he had great ability, and some of the noble qualities of an old Roman. He would have been a great man in the

days of the Republic.

His extant works consist of epistles, and of ethical treatises on various subjects, the best being On Consolation, On Providence, and On Philosophical Constancy. He also wrote on physical phenomena, composing a work called Quæstiones Naturales, in which he is thought to have anticipated some of the principles of modern physics.

There are extant ten tragedies, which are ascribed to him by Quintilian, but their real authorship is a debated point. They are not adapted to the stage, are overloaded with declamation, and are destitute of dramatic vigor, though rich in moral sentiments.

His philosophical views are usually clear and practical. He cared, indeed, very little for abstract speculation, having the true Roman mind, and being far more inclined to incul

cate than to investigate.

He is, in fact, more like a teacher of youth than a philosopher, and gives maxims without any accompanying proof.

His Epistles are a series of moral essays in that form, and are the most interesting of his works. They are rich in varied thought and natural reflection, and teach that the great end of science is to learn how to live and to die.

He has the false declamatory style of his father, attending more to expression than to thought, and elaborating his writings too much to make them pleasant reading. They have an affected, florid and bombastic manner, all sparkle and glitter, and lack the repose and simplicity essential to true art.

THE FOLLY OF ANGER.

How vain and idle are many of those things that make us stock mad! A resty horse, the overturning of a glass, the falling of a key, the dragging of a chair, a jealousy, a misconstruction. How shall that man endure the extremities of hunger and thirst, who flies out into rage for putting a little too much water into his wine? What haste is there to lay a servant by the heels, or break a leg or an arm immediately for it; as if he were not to have the same power over him an hour after that he has at that instant! The answer of a servant, a wife, a tenant, puts some people out of all patience; and yet they can quarrel with the government for not allowing them the same liberty in public which they themselves deny to their own family. If they say nothing, it is contumacy; if they speak or laugh, it is insolence. As if a man had his ears given him only for music, whereas we must suffer all sorts of noises, good and bad, both of man and beasts.

That was a blasphemous and sottish extravagance of Caius Cæsar, who challenged Jupiter for making such a noise with his thunder that he could not hear his mimics, and so invented a machine in imitation of it, to oppose thunder to thunder; a brutal conceit, to imagine, either that he could reach the Almighty, or that the Almighty could not reach him.

And every jot as ridiculous, though not so impious, was that of Cyrus, who, in his design upon Babylon, found a river in his way that put a stop to his march; the current, being strong, car

ried away one of the horses that belonged to his own chariot. Upon this he swore that since it had obstructed his passage, it should never hinder anybody's else; and presently set his whole army to work upon it, which diverted it into an hundred and fourscore channels, and laid it dry. In this ignoble and unprofitable employment he lost his time, and the soldiers their courage, and gave his adversaries an opportunity of providing themselves while he was waging war with a river instead of an enemy.

OF IMPERTINENT STUDIES.

He who duly considers the business of life and death will find that he has little time to spare from that study; and yet how we trifle away our hours upon impertinent niceties and cavils! Will Plato's imaginary ideas make me an honest man? There is neither certainty in them, nor substance. A mouse is a syllable; but a syllable does not eat cheese: therefore a mouse does not eat cheese. O these childish follies! Is it for this that we spend our blood, and our good humor, and grow grey in our closets? We are jesting, when we should be helping the miserable; as well ourselves as others. There is no sporting with men in distress. The felicity of mankind depends upon the councils of philosophers. Let us rather consider what nature has made superfluous and what necessary; how easy our conditions are, and how delicious that life which is governed by reason rather than opinion!

There are impertinent studies as well as impertinent men. Did'ymus the grammarian wrote four thousand books, wherein he is much concerned to discover where Homer was born; who was Eneas' true mother; with other fopperies that a man would labor to forget if he knew them. Is it not an important question which of the two was first, the mallet or the tongs? Some people are extremely anxious to know how many oars Ulysses had; which was first written, the Iliad or the Odyssey; or if they were both done by the same hand. A man is never a jot the more learned for his curiosity, but much the more troublesome. Am I ever the more just, the more moderate, valiant, or liberal, for knowing that Curius Dentatus was the first who carried elephants in triumph? Teach me my duty to Providence, to my neighbor, and to myself; to dispute, to doubt, to master my appetites, and to rerounce the world.-L'Estrange.

STOICAL FATALISM.

I am neither compelled to do nor to suffer anything against my will. I am not a slave to God, but I bow to his will. The more so because I know that all things are fixed and proceed according to an everlasting law. Destiny is our guide, and the hour of our birth has disposed all the remainder of our lives. Each cause depends upon a preceding one; a long chain of circumstances links together all things, both public and private. Therefore we must bear all things with fortitude, since all things come to pass, and do not, as we suppose, happen. Our joys and sorrows have been determined long ago; and although a great variety of items distinguishes the lives of individuals, the sum total is the same. Perishable creatures ourselves, that which we have received is perishable likewise.

LU'CAN.
BORN 39 A.D.

M. An'næus Luca'nus, the great epic poet of the decline of Latin literature, was a native of Cordova in Spain, being a nephew of the philosopher Seneca. Pliny relates a story which has in it a suspicious flavor of Greek origin, that in his infant days a swarm of bees settled on his lips. He was brought by his father to Rome while quite young, and received there an excellent education. He was a schoolfellow of the poet Persius, and a friend of the emperor Nero, entering upon life with the most brilliant auspices.

But his good fortune was soon overclouded. Nero, who could not bear a rival, and who grew jealous of Lucan's poetry and his fame, forbade his reciting his verses in public, then the common mode of publication. He also silenced him as an advocate. Lucan, bitter at this provocation, joined a conspiracy against the emperor's life in 65 A.D. The plot failed. Lucan was arrested, and at sight of the instruments of torture, and under promise of a pardon if he should point out his associates, he is said by Tacitus to have actually impeached his own mother.

This base act failed, however. The mother was overlooked by Nero, and a warrant for Lucan's death issued. Now that it was inevitable, he met death with a philosophic calmness, opening his own veins, and reciting, as he bled to death, a description from his poems of a soldier dying of his wounds. His death occurred in his twenty-seventh year.

Despite the faults of Lucan's character, among which vanity and levity may be named, he has gained a conspicuous place among the poets of Rome. The only work of his that now exists, the Pharsa'lia, is an epic poem in ten books, its subject being the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey. In this he shows a love of liberty so far as he dared express it. He flatters Nero at the start, but at the end pours out a flood of satire against the cruel tyrant.

As an epic it lacks the comprehensiveness and unity of the greatest works of its class, proceeding in the manner of annals, and being marked by a style which is often turgid and obscure, and is full of the rhetorical affectation of his day. But with all its faults the Pharsalia affords ample evidence that Lucan was a man of original and powerful genius, and had he lived to finish and correct his poem, he might have pruned it of many of these imperfections.

He is inferior to Virgil in taste, propriety of thought, elegance of diction and metrical harmony; but in originality, in imaginative ardor, and in the display of character, he surpasses the great Augustan poet. He has an excellent historic subject, which he has treated with brilliancy and animation, drawing many noble historical pictures, while the characters of Cæsar and Pompey are masterpieces of word painting. He has a taste for the sublime, both in the physical and moral worlds, and with it an epigrammatic felicity which has secured to many of his lines a constant freshness, as part of the familiarly remembered literature of the world.