by Plato and Pericles. But the heart loved luxury
and soft, silken refinements, and Grecian philosophers in their palaces
refused to let their slaves go.

Wide, indeed, the gulf separating our age of kindness from Cicero's age
of cruelty! The difference is almost wholly a difference of heart.
This age has oratory and wisdom, and so had Cicero's; this age has
poetry and art, and so had that; but our age has heart and sympathy,
and Cicero's had not. Caesar's mind was the mind of a scholar, but his
hands were red with the blood of a half-million men slain in unjust
wars. Augustus loved refinement, literature and music. He assembled
at his table the scholars of a nation, yet his culture did not forbid
the slaying of ten thousand gladiators at his various garden parties.

We admire Pliny's literary style. One evening Pliny returned home from
the funeral of the wife of a friend and sat down to write that friend a
note of gratitude for having so arranged the gladiatorial spectacle as
to make the funeral service pass off quite pleasantly. For that age of
intellect was also an age of blood; the era of art and luxury was also
an era of cruelty and crime. The intellect lent a shining luster to
the era of Augustus, but because it was intellect only it was gilt and
not gold. Had the heart re-enforced the intellect with sympathy and
justice the age of Augustus might have been an era golden, indeed, and
also perpetual.

Great men capitalize the impotency of unsupported intellect.
Ten-talent men have often known more than they would do. The children
of genius have not always lived up to their moral light. Burns' mind
ran swiftly forward, but his will followed afar off. If the poet's
forehead was in the clouds, his feet were in the mire. How noble,
also, Byron's thoughts, but how mean his life! Goethe uttered the
wisdom of a sage, as did Rousseau, yet their deeds were often those we
would expect from a slave with a low brow. Even of Shakespeare, it is
said in the morning he polished his sonnets, while at midnight he
poached game from a neighboring estate. Our era bestows unstinted
admiration upon the essays of Lord Bacon. How noble his aphorisms!
How petty his envy and avarice! What scholarship was his, and what
cunning also! With what splendor of argument does he plead for the
advancement of learning and liberty! With what meanness does he take
bribes from the rich against the poor! His mind seems like a palace