sleep," says
Horace, "despises not the humble cottages of rustics, nor the shaded
banks, nor valleys whose foliage waves with the western wind;" and every
reader will recall the magnificent words of our own great Shakespeare--

"Why rather, Sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull'd with sounds of sweetest melody?"

To the subject of freedom, and to the power which man possesses to make
himself entirely independent of all surrounding circumstances, Epictetus
incessantly recurs. With the possibility of banishment to an
_ergastulum_ perpetually before his eyes, he defines a prison as being
any situation in which a man is placed against his will; to Socrates for
instance the prison was no prison, for he was there willingly, and no
man _need_ be in prison, against his will if he has learnt, as one of
his primary duties, a cheerful acquiescence in the inevitable. By the
expression of such sentiments Epictetus had anticipated by fifteen
hundred years the immortal truth so sweetly expressed by Lovelace:

"_Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage_;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage."

Situated as he was, we can hardly wonder that thoughts like these
occupied a large share of the mind of Epictetus, or that he had taught
himself to lay hold of them with the firmest possible grasp. When asked,
"Who among men is rich?" he replied, "He who suffices for himself;" an
expression which contains the germ of the truth so forcibly expressed in
the Book of Proverbs, "The backslider in heart shall be filled with his
own ways, and a good man _shall be satisfied from himself_". Similarly,
when asked, "Who is free?" he replies, "The man who masters his own
self," with much the same tone of expressions as that of Solomon, "He
that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he that ruleth his
spirit than he that taketh a city." Socrates was one of the great models
whom Epictetus constantly seats before him, and this is one of the
anecdotes which he relates about him with admiration. When Archelaus
sent a message to express the intention of making him rich, Socrates
bade the messenger inform him that at Athens four quarts of meal might
be bought for three halfpence, and the fo