limity of your ideas. Now that we have no bodies they
appear less unnatural than I should have thought them in the other world.

_Princess of Orange_.--Adieu, madam. Our souls are of a different order,
and were not made to sympathise or converse with each other.

DIALOGUE XVII.

MARCUS BRUTUS--POMPONIUS ATTICUS.

_Brutus_.--Well, Atticus, I find that, notwithstanding your friendship
for Cicero and for me, you survived us both many years, with the same
cheerful spirit you had always possessed, and, by prudently wedding your
daughter to Agrippa, secured the favour of Octavius Caesar, and even
contracted a close alliance with him by your granddaughter's marriage
with Tiberius Nero.

_Atticus_.--You know, Brutus, my philosophy was the Epicurean. I loved
my friends, and I served them in their wants and distresses with great
generosity; but I did not think myself obliged to die when they died, or
not to make others as occasions should offer.

_Brutus_.--You did, I acknowledge, serve your friends, as far as you
could, without bringing yourself, on their account, into any great danger
or disturbance of mind: but that you loved them I much doubt. If you
loved Cicero, how could you love Antony? If you loved me, how could you
love Octavius? If you loved Octavius, how could you avoid taking part
against Antony in their last civil war? Affection cannot be so strangely
divided, and with so much equality, among men of such opposite
characters, and who were such irreconcilable enemies to each other.

_Atticus_.--From my earliest youth I possessed the singular talent of
ingratiating myself with the heads of different parties, and yet not
engaging with any of them so far as to disturb my own quiet. My family
was connected with the Marian party; and, though I retired to Athens that
I might not be unwillingly involved in the troubles which that turbulent
faction had begun to excite, yet when young Marius was declared an enemy
by the Senate, I sent him a sum of money to support him in his exile. Nor
did this hinder me from making my court so well to Sylla, upon his coming
to Athens, that I obtained from him the highest marks of his favour.
Nevertheless, when he pressed me to go with him to Rome, I declined it,
being as unwilling to fight for him against the Marian party, as for them
against him. He admired my conduct; and at his departure from Athens,
ordered all the presents made to him during his abode in that city t