hose thoughts Mr. Long[11] has thus faithfully reproduced is
perhaps the most beautiful figure in history. He is one of those consoling
and hope-inspiring marks, which stand forever to remind our weak and
easily discouraged race how high human goodness and perseverance have
once been carried, and may be carried again. The interest of mankind is
peculiarly attracted by examples of signal goodness in high places; for
that testimony to the worth of goodness is the most striking which is
borne by those to whom all the means of pleasure and self-indulgence lay
open, by those who had at their command the kingdoms of the world and the
glory of them. Marcus Aurelius was the ruler of the grandest of empires;
and he was one of the best of men. Besides him, history presents one or
two sovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred.
But Marcus Aurelius has, for us moderns, this great superiority in
interest over Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of
society modern by its essential characteristics, in an epoch akin to our
own, in a brilliant centre of civilization. Trajan talks of "our
enlightened age" just as glibly as the "Times" talks of it. Marcus
Aurelius thus becomes for us a man like ourselves, a man in all things
tempted as we are. Saint Louis inhabits an atmosphere of mediaeval
Catholicism, which the man of the nineteenth century may admire, indeed,
may even passionately wish to inhabit, but which, strive as he will, he
cannot really inhabit. Alfred belongs to a state of society (I say it with
all deference to the "Saturday Review" critic who keeps such jealous watch
over the honor of our Saxon ancestors) half-barbarous. Neither Alfred nor
Saint Louis can be morally and intellectually as near to us as Marcus
Aurelius.

The record of the outward life of this admirable man has in it little of
striking incident. He was born at Rome on the 26th of April, in the year
121 of the Christian era. He was nephew and son-in-law to his predecessor
on the throne, Antoninus Pius. When Antoninus died, he was forty years
old, but from the time of his earliest manhood he had assisted in
administering public affairs. Then, after his uncle's death in 161, for
nineteen years he reigned as Emperor. The barbarians were pressing on the
Roman frontier, and a great part of Marcus Aurelius's nineteen years of
reign was passed in campaigning. His absences from Rome were numerous and
long. We hear of him in A