se of being repeated in those divine and benignant
ears. No doubt the superb freedman, who had been allowed so rich a share
of the flatteries lavished on his master, would take the opportunity--if
not out of good nature, at least out of vanity,--to retail them in the
imperial ear. If the moment were but favourable, who knows but what at
some oblivious and crapulous moment the Emperor might be induced to sign
an order for our philosopher's recall?

Let us not be hard on him. Exile and wretchedness are stern trials, and
it is difficult for him to brave a martyr's misery who has no conception
of a martyr's crown. To a man who, like Seneca, aimed at being not only
a philosopher, but also a man of the world--who in this very treatise
criticises the Stoics for their ignorance of life--there would not have
seemed to be even the shadow of disgrace in a private effusion of
insincere flattery intended to win the remission of a deplorable
banishment. Or, if we condemn Seneca, let us remember that Christians,
no less than philosophers, have attained a higher eminence only to
exemplify a more disastrous fall. The flatteries of Seneca to Claudius
are not more fulsome, and are infinitely less disgraceful, than those
which fawning bishops exuded on his counterpart, King James. And if the
Roman Stoic can gain nothing from a comparison with the yet more
egregious moral failure of the greatest of Christian thinkers---Francis
Bacon, Viscount St. Alban's--let us not forget that a Savonarola and a
Cranmer recanted under torment, and that the anguish of exile drew even
from the starry and imperial spirit of Dante Alighieri words and
sentiments for which in his noblest moments he might have blushed.

CHAPTER IX.

SENECA'S RECALL FROM EXILE.

Of the last five years of Seneca's weary exile no trace has been
preserved to us. What were his alternations of hope and fear, of
devotion to philosophy and of hankering after the world which he had
lost, we cannot tell. Any hopes which he may have entertained respecting
the intervention of Polybius in his favour must have been utterly
quenched when he heard that the freedman, though formerly powerful with
Messalina, had forfeited his own life in consequence of her
machinations. But the closing period of his days in Corsica must have
brought him thrilling news, which would save him from falling into
absolute despair.

For the career of Messalina was drawing rapidly to a close. The life of
this be