ines!

_Lucian._ Enjoy, said he, the pleasant walks where you are: repose and
eat gratefully the fruit that falls into your bosom: do not weary your
feet with an excursion, at the end whereof you will find no
resting-place: reject not the odour of roses for the fumes of pitch
and sulphur. What horrible doctrines!

_Timotheus._ Speak seriously. He was much too bad for ridicule.

_Lucian._ I will then speak as you desire me, seriously. His smile
was so unaffected and so graceful, that I should have thought it very
injudicious to set my laugh against it. No philosopher ever lived with
such uniform purity, such abstinence from censoriousness, from
controversy, from jealousy, and from arrogance.

_Timotheus._ Ah, poor mortal! I pity him, as far as may be; he is in
hell: it would be wicked to wish him out: we are not to murmur against
the all-wise dispensations.

_Lucian._ I am sure he would not; and it is therefore I hope he is
more comfortable than you believe.

_Timotheus._ Never have I defiled my fingers, and never will I defile
them, by turning over his writings. But in regard to Plato, I can have
no objection to take your advice.

_Lucian._ He will reward your assiduity: but he will assist you very
little if you consult him principally (and eloquence for this should
principally be consulted) to strengthen your humanity. Grandiloquent
and sonorous, his lungs seem to play the better for the absence of the
heart. His imagination is the most conspicuous, buoyed up by swelling
billows over unsounded depths. There are his mild thunders, there are
his glowing clouds, his traversing coruscations, and his shooting
stars. More of true wisdom, more of trustworthy manliness, more of
promptitude and power to keep you steady and straightforward on the
perilous road of life, may be found in the little manual of Epictetus,
which I could write in the palm of my left hand, than there is in all
the rolling and redundant volumes of this mighty rhetorician, which
you may begin to transcribe on the summit of the Great Pyramid, carry
down over the Sphinx at the bottom, and continue on the sands half-way
to Memphis. And indeed the materials are appropriate; one part being
far above our sight, and the other on what, by the most befitting
epithet, Homer calls the _no-corn-bearing_.

_Timotheus._ There are many who will stand against you on this ground.

_Lucian._ With what perfect ease and fluency do some of the dullest
men in existen