and
influence, a writer deserving all attention and respect; it is (I must
be pardoned for saying) because he is not sufficiently leavened with
them, that he falls just short of being a great writer.

That which gives to the moral writings of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
their peculiar character and charm, is their being suffused and softened
by something of this very sentiment whence Christian morality draws its
best power. Mr. Long[199] has recently published in a convenient form a
translation of these writings, and has thus enabled English readers to
judge Marcus Aurelius for themselves; he has rendered his countrymen a
real service by so doing. Mr. Long's reputation as a scholar is a
sufficient guarantee of the general fidelity and accuracy of his
translation; on these matters, besides, I am hardly entitled to speak,
and my praise is of no value. But that for which I and the rest of the
unlearned may venture to praise Mr. Long is this: that he treats Marcus
Aurelius's writings, as he treats all the other remains of Greek and
Roman antiquity which he touches, not as a dead and dry matter of
learning, but as documents with a side of modern applicability and
living interest, and valuable mainly so far as this side in them can be
made clear; that as in his notes on Plutarch's Roman Lives he deals with
the modern epoch of Caesar and Cicero, not as food for schoolboys, but as
food for men, and men engaged in the current of contemporary life and
action, so in his remarks and essays on Marcus Aurelius he treats this
truly modern striver and thinker not as a Classical Dictionary hero, but
as a present source from which to draw "example of life, and instruction
of manners." Why may not a son of Dr. Arnold[200] say, what might
naturally here be said by any other critic, that in this lively and
fruitful way of considering the men and affairs of ancient Greece and
Rome, Mr. Long resembles Dr. Arnold?

One or two little complaints, however, I have against Mr. Long, and I
will get them off my mind at once. In the first place, why could he not
have found gentler and juster terms to describe the translation of his
predecessor, Jeremy Collier,[201]--the redoubtable enemy of stage
plays,--than these: "a most coarse and vulgar copy of the original?" As
a matter of taste, a translator should deal leniently with his
predecessor; but putting that out of the question, Mr. Long's language
is a great deal too hard. Most English people who kn