ed silence by any more such noises? The philosophers felt so
themselves. They had no mind to be martyrs, for they had nothing for
which to testify. They had no message for mankind, and mankind no
interest for them. All that was left for them was to take care of their
own souls; and fancying that they saw something like Plato's ideal
republic in the pure monotheism of the Guebres, their philosophic
emperor the Khozroo, and his holy caste of magi, seven of them set
off to Persia, to forget the hateful existence of Christianity in
that realised ideal. Alas for the facts! The purest monotheism, they
discovered, was perfectly compatible with bigotry and ferocity, luxury
and tyranny, serails and bowstrings, incestuous marriages and corpses
exposed to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air; and in
reasonable fear for their own necks, the last seven Sages of Greece
returned home weary-hearted, into the Christian Empire from which they
had fled, fully contented with the permission, which the Khozroo had
obtained for them from Justinian, to hold their peace, and die among
decent people. So among decent people they died, leaving behind them, as
their last legacy to mankind, Simplicius's Commentaries on Epictetus's
_Enchiridion_, an essay on the art of egotism, by obeying which,
whosoever list may become as perfect a Pharisee as ever darkened the
earth of God. Peace be to their ashes!.... They are gone to their own
place................

Wulf, too, had gone to his own place, wheresoever that may be. He died
in Spain, full of years and honours, at the court of Adolf and Placidia,
having resigned his sovereignty into the hands of his lawful chieftain,
and having lived long enough to see Goderic and his younger companions
in arms settled with their Alexandrian brides upon the sunny slopes from
which they had expelled the Vandals and the Suevi, to be the ancestors
of 'bluest-blooded' Castilian nobles. Wulf died, as he had lived, a
heathen. Placidia, who loved him well, as she loved all righteous and
noble souls, had succeeded once in persuading him to accept baptism.
Adolf himself acted as one of his sponsors; and the old warrior was
in the act of stepping into the font, when he turned suddenly to the
bishop, and asked where were the souls of his heathen ancestors? 'In
hell,' replied the worthy prelate. Wulf drew back from the font, and
threw his bearskin cloak around him.... 'He would prefer, if Adolf had
no objection, to go