sia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Greece; but, above all,
in the countries on the Danube, where the war with the barbarians was
going on--in Austria, Moravia, Hungary. In these countries much of his
"Journal" seems to have been written; parts of it are dated from them; and
there, a few weeks before his fifty-ninth birthday, he fell sick and died.
The record of him on which his fame chiefly rests is the record of his
inward life--his "Journal," or "Commentaries," or "Meditations," or
"Thoughts," for by all these names has the work been called. Perhaps the
most interesting of the records of his outward life is that which the
first book of this work supplies, where he gives an account of his
education, recites the names of those to whom he is indebted for it, and
enumerates his obligations to each of them. It is a refreshing and
consoling picture, a priceless treasure for those, who, sick of the "wild
and dreamlike trade of blood and guile," which seems to be nearly the
whole that history has to offer to our view, seek eagerly for that
substratum of right thinking and well-doing which in all ages must surely
have somewhere existed, for without it the continued life of humanity
would have been impossible.

"From my mother I learned piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only
from evil deeds but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my
way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich." Let us remember
that, the next time we are reading the sixth satire of Juvenal. "From my
tutor I learned" (hear it, ye tutors of princes!) "endurance of labor, and
to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with
other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander." The
vices and foibles of the Greek sophist or rhetorician--the _Graeculus
esuriens_--are in everybody's mind; but he who reads Marcus Aurelius's
account of his Greek teachers and masters, will understand how it is that,
in spite of the vices and foibles of individual _Graeculi_, the education
of the human race owes to Greece a debt which can never be overrated.

The vague and colorless praise of history leaves on the mind hardly any
impression of Antoninus Pius: it is only from the private memoranda of his
nephew that we learn what a disciplined, hard-working, gentle, wise,
virtuous man he was; a man who, perhaps, interests mankind less than his
immortal nephew only because he has left in writing no record of his inner
life--_caret qu