at these petty details about the body (a mere husk of flesh
binding the soul) were of no importance. He was not weaned till he was
eight years old, a singular circumstance. Having a turn for philosophy,
he attended the schools of Alexandria, concerning which Kingsley's
"Hypatia" is the most accessible authority.

All these anecdotes, I should have said, we learn from Porphyry, the
Tyrian, who was a kind of Boswell to Plotinus. The philosopher himself
often reminds me of Dr. Johnson, especially as Dr. Johnson is described
by Mr. Carlyle. Just as the good doctor was a sound Churchman in the
beginning of the age of new ideas, so Plotinus was a sound pagan in the
beginning of the triumph of Christianity.

Like Johnson, Plotinus was lazy and energetic and short-sighted. He
wrote a very large number of treatises, but he never took the trouble to
read through them when once they were written, because his eyes were
weak. He was superstitious, like Dr. Johnson, yet he had lucid intervals
of common sense, when he laughed at the superstitions of his disciples.
Like Dr. Johnson, he was always begirt by disciples, men and women,
Bozzys and Thrales. He was so full of honour and charity, that his house
was crowded with persons in need of help and friendly care. Though he
lived so much in the clouds and among philosophical abstractions, he was
an excellent man of business. Though a philosopher he was pious, and was
courageous, dreading the plague no more than the good doctor dreaded the
tempest that fell on him when he was voyaging to Coll.

You will admit that the parallel is pretty close for an historical
parallel, despite the differences between the ascetic of Wolf-town and
the sage of Bolt Court, hard by Fleet Street!

To return to the education of Plotinus. He was twenty-eight when he went
up to the University of Alexandria. For eleven years he diligently
attended the lectures of Ammonius. Then he went on the Emperor Gordian's
expedition to the East, hoping to learn the philosophy of the Hindus. The
Upanishads would have puzzled Plotinus, had he reached India; but he
never did. Gordian's army was defeated in Mesopotamia, no "blessed word"
to Gordian, and Plotinus hardly escaped with his life. He must have felt
like Stendhal on the retreat from Moscow.

From Syria his friend and disciple Amelius led him to Rome, and here, as
novelists say, "a curious thing happened." There was in Rome an Egyptian
priest, who off