concerning the conduct of this mortal life. Some of these reflections I regard as original with yourself; others as rather transmitted than originated by you. The sentiments are so majestic, they breathe such extraordinary nobility, that the life of man does not seem to me long enough to fathom and acquire them perfectly.

you, it seems as if you yourself were present; in fact, I have the feeling that you are always with us. When you do begin to come, I trust we shall meet frequently.

"Hoping this will find you well, I remain, etc.

"Yours," etc.

By way of answer, we have:

"MY DEAR SENECA, I was very glad to receive your letter yesterday, and should have replied immediately if I had had a messenger at hand. You will understand that care has to be exercised concerning the person to whom letters are entrusted, and the when and the how. Pray do not think me insensible to your kindness, therefore, if I exercise some caution in selecting a messenger. As to your flattering remarks regarding the reception of my letters in a certain place, I can but congratulate myself on having won the approval of so distinguished a judge; for I do not think that you, censor, sophist, and master of a great prince, would say such things unless you believed them.

"May you live long and prosper."
Seneca to Paul: -

"I have arranged and classified a number of selections from certain volumes with special reference to their being read by Cæsar; and if I should be so happy as to secure his attention and interest, perhaps you also may be present. Otherwise I will appoint a day when you and I may go over this work together. Perhaps it would even be better for me to communicate with you, if I could do so safely, before bringing these writings to his notice, in order that you might be sure that you had been fairly represented.

"Believe me, my dearest Paul," etc. Paul to Seneca:

"Every time I peruse a letter from

"I am distressed at your keeping so obstinately in the background. What makes you so reserved? If it be the indignation of the master at your having withdrawn from the old faith and ritual, and fixed your affections elsewhere, you will have an opportunity to claim that you did it, not lightly, but after mature deliberation."

The confused and feeble answer to this mysterious appeal purports to have been addressed by Paul to Seneca and his friend Lucilius conjointly :

"Concerning the subject of your letter I cannot write with pen and ink, of which the former marks and emphasizes matters, and the latter blazons them abroad; the less since I know that there are certain persons of and among you who are with us and understand me perfectly. Respect must be paid to all, and the more scrupulously the more readily they take offense. we can but be patient with them, we shall win them over at last, provided only they be capable of repentance. "Greeting to you both.' Seneca then writes to Paul and Theophilus:

If

"My reading of your epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Achaians was very well received; and now may we so live as to illustrate them to the glory of God. The indwelling Spirit is holier and mightier than you; it lifts you out of yourself, and enables you to give a new and loftier utterance to sublime ideas of antiquity. I could wish, therefore, since your matter is so fine, that the dignity of your style were on

a level with it. To be perfectly candid with you, my brother, and also conscientious with myself, I must tell you that the Augustus was greatly struck by your ideas, but that he exclaimed, when he had heard your exordium to virtue, 'It is a marvelous thing that a man who has never been properly instructed can think and speak like this!' I reminded him that the gods are wont to speak by the mouths of 'innocents, or even of those who are capable of misrepresenting their doctrine, and I cited the example of a simple rustic, Vaticanus of Reate, to whom they who were in fact Castor and Pollux appeared as two men, which seems to have convinced him. Farewell."

Paul to Seneca:

"However satisfactory it may be to know that Cæsar is interested in our doctrines, I beg that you will not be dismayed, but simply put upon your guard, if, hereafter, he should become less friendly. You took, as I think, a very grave step in merely bringing to his notice a mode of worship so contrary to that in which he was brought up; for even if he does worship the gods of the Gentiles, I do not see why you should force the fact on his attention, unless, indeed, you do it out of excessive attachment to me. For the future I beg you to desist. You must not allow your partiality for myself to compromise you with your master."

Se

After this insult to the memory of the intrepid Apostle, the reader will perhaps feel that he has had enough. But let us run over rapidly the remaining numbers of this correspondence. They are few and short. neca replies with vague assurances that he will be more careful in future, and Paul then offers a sort of apology, in his turn, for having written with a freedom hardly consistent with the principles of humility inculcated by his own religion.

Then follow three letters from Seneca to Paul, of which the order of pre

cedence has been much disputed, but it really makes very little difference which one we take first. Two of them are chiefly complimentary: one containing the passage quoted by St. Jerome about Paul's predominance in his own sect; the other expressing great admiration for the allegorical and interior sense to be detected in so many of the Apostle's writings, but also suggesting once again that he would do well to improve his style. The third letter of this group looks, at first sight, especially interesting. It begins with a profession of deep concern for Paul's personal safety, and a general exhortation, à la mode stoïque, to constancy in misfortune. It then alludes to extensive fires in Rome, for which it more than hints at Nero's own responsibility, and to the dangers encompassing the whole Christian community. posing the letter to be genuine, this could not refer to the great conflagration; for the details which follow concerning the amount of ground burned over and the number of dwellings destroyed are inconsistent with those given by the unimpeachable chroniclers of the time; and, moreover, the tenor of the letter implies that it was addressed to Paul in Rome, whereas the great fire occurred in 64, when we know he was not there.

Sup

The fourteenth and last letter of the correspondence purports to be from Paul to Seneca, and runs as follows:

"There have been revealed to your meditative spirit such things as the Divinity has disclosed to few. I therefore sow good seed in a fertile field; speaking not in a material sense, of that which is corruptible, but of the stable word which cometh forth from God, who liveth and increaseth [!] forever. The fruit of your wisdom can never fail you, provided only you give no heed to the objections whether of Jews or Gentiles. A new career will be open to you as an author when you begin to set forth with the refinements

it seems as if no warm admirer of either correspondent could ever have wished to believe them genuine; and indeed St. Jerome's use of the present tense, quæ leguntur a plurimis,-which are (now) read by very many people, appears in itself to point to the fact that they had been put forth as a recent discovery some time in the fourth century. St. Augustine uses almost precisely the same language; nor has it ever been customary to include the correspondence among the undisputed works either of the Apostle or the philosopher, except for that short period immediately succeeding the revival of learning, from 1475, say, to 1550, when sacred and profane lore were so wildly and uncritically confounded, in the first glow of humanistic enthusiasm. Erasmus, indeed, who inserted the letters in his edition of the works of Seneca, printed at Bâle in 1529, clears himself conclusively, in his trenchant commentary, from the imputation of accepting them as genuine. He denounces them roundly as a forgery "both frigid and inept; " permits himself even to say that "the divine Hieronymus, who must have seen through

the cheat, abused the credulity of the simple by according them such notice as he did; "explodes in righteous wrath at the chétif and shuffling figure which "the bravest of gospel warriors" is made to cut in these lines; and apologizes to the reader, at the end of his diatribe, for having said “nimis multa de re nihili."

Modern Catholic writers, on the other hand, have usually rather yearned to establish the orthodoxy of Seneca. One does not quite see why; for, as Erasmus points out, he was surely a more striking moralist, and may be read with more profit, as a pagan than as a Christian. Amédée Fleury, who has consecrated two laborious volumes to the relations of this eminent pair, and who thinks that there have been two sets of spurious letters, and that the one which we possess is not even the same which was read by SS. Jerome and Augustine, sums up his own position by saying that he is by no means as fully convinced of any interchange of letters between Paul and Seneca as he is of the reality of their friendship; while that gloriously overbearing idealist, Count Joseph de Maistre, has seldom given himself a more delightful démenti than on this very subject:

66

:

'Do you believe,' the senator asks him, in the ninth of the Petersburg 'evenings,' in the Christianity of Seneca, and his epistolary correspondence with St. Paul?'

"I should be very unwilling,' replies the count, 'to speak positively one way or the other, but I believe that there is a foundation of truth in both suppositions; and I am just as sure that Seneca heard Paul preach as that you hear me at this moment." "

Considering that the senator was an imaginary interlocutor, this does not. appear greatly to strengthen the case in favor of Seneca's Christian privileges.

Fifty years after De Maistre, and

fifteen or so after Fleury, Charles Aubertin, in his Étude sur les Rapports Supposés between St. Paul and Seneca, disposed with little ceremony of the theory of a second false correspondence, and, after an exceedingly minute and learned inquiry into the source of those expressions in the philosophical writings of Seneca which have been thought to savor most of Christian influence, announced it as his conclusion that if Seneca were a Christian, so were Cicero, Zeno, and the entire Porch; even Menander, in his New Comedy, might lay some claim to the title, and Plato was more Christian than they all.1

Paul left Rome in the year 63, not returning until 68,-whether voluntarily or under a second arrest we do not know,

to meet, in the serene spirit of the grand passage, "I am now ready to be offered," etc., the death of a Christian martyr. Seneca lived on for two years from the time of Paul's departure, in the semi-retirement which he courted ever after the death of Bur

rus.

During this interval he composed the treatises De Otio, De Providentia, and the Quæstiones Naturales, a few tragedies, and also, it is thought, almost all of those Letters to Lucilius which contain a full exposition of his philosophy. The singular poverty of these last in personal details, or illustrations of the life of the time, will excite no wonder when we find how superciliously Seneca regarded the gossiping propensities of Cicero.

"I am never at a loss," he says, "for the wherewithal to fill my letters, without having recourse to such matters as abound in the epistles of Cicero, such as: who is going to stand for office; who trusts to his own powers, and who to another's; who expects to get the consulate through Cæsar's in

1 As a specimen of those "echoes" of Christianity which the enthusiastic supporters of the theory of Seneca's conversion have detected in his works, we may give the following. It is possible, he says, to avert danger from

fluence, and who through that of Pompey; what a skinflint Cæcilius is, and how his very relatives cannot get money from him at less than twelve per cent.

In 65, Nero, now perfectly enslaved to the whims of Poppaa, made use of the discovery of Piso's conspiracy to charge his old tutor with complicity in the plot, and so rid himself of a silent but none the less inconvenient censor. Seneca was respectfully permitted to be his own executioner, and to choose the manner of his death; and he followed the example of Thrasea, and so many more of the best Romans of that bitter epoch, in electing to open his veins in the presence of his weeping friends, and of the centurion who had been sent to him, probably in his villa on the Via Nomentana, a few miles from Rome, "to announce, as Tacitus says, "the last necessity." He died like a brave pagan, encouraging his attendants, and endeavoring to console his beloved wife Paulina, whom, with true consideration, he besought to leave the room, that she might not witness his lingering agony. As a pagan we find him honorable and admirable in his end; while the aphorisms which follow, and which are selected almost at random from his grave and sententious letters, may be read, Erasmus with all the more profit, if we regard them as the independent utterances of unassisted pagan wisdom.

as

says,

"All that we have, dear Lucilius, belongs to others. There is but one thing which is truly our own, and that is time."

"T is not the man who has little that is poor, but he who desires to have more."

"There is a tricksy element even in misfortune. It may come; it may

lightning by an appeal to the gods, "whom we ought always to implore to accord us good and deliver us from evil." The last clause has actually been cited as borrowed from the Lord's Prayer.

"Philosophy teaches us to act, not to talk."

"What is wisdom? It is always to choose the same thing, and always to refuse the same. And we need not even add the small proviso that the thing chosen be the right thing, for no one can, by any possibility, find a lasting pleasure in that which is not right." "The pang which I can bear is light; that which I cannot bear is brief."

"My friend Demetrius says that a perfectly safe life, and one exempt from all reverses, would be a Dead Sea."

"Leisure without letters is death; or, rather, it is being buried alive.”

"What am I to do? Life flies from

me, and death pursues. Is there no remedy? Yes. If I do not fly from death, life will not fly from me."

"I enjoy life because I am ready to leave it."

"Long time we have been scattering. Now, surely, in our old age, we may begin without reproach to gather in. We have lived at sea; let us die in port."

"That death which we so dread and shun interrupts life, does not destroy it. A day is coming which will restore us to the light." Harriet Waters Preston. Louise Dodge.

I.

THE latest word in botany will have it that flowers are but modified leaves; that their colors, markings, and even honey-sweets are but so many lures to obtain the service of insects as pollen distributers. Be it so. Still unim paired is the lovely mystery of flowers. Their household economies the poet will not despise, their diplomacies towards the insect world the poet will not arraign. Their value to the imagination and the heart is not lessened, that they know and pursue their own affairs unaware of our delectation. Recently a lady told me of her wonder, and how she of her "wonder made religion," in finding among the grass of a city park a flower so small (speedwell?) that its perfect symmetry and purple pansy-like beauty were fully revealed only by the microscope. The sum of her wonder seemed to be: What was this flower doing there in the grass, invisible, or so minute as to contribute nothing to the human observer at large? What

was it doing? Leading its own life, a world of pleasure and enterprise within itself; incidentally a joy to the chance discoverer.

The last time I saw our earliest and commonest of violets blooming in the grass, its flowers were touched with a strange ethereality, to my eye suggesting so many gleams of purple light shot from a prism into the more earthly and opaque greenness of the surrounding grass. Contemplation of this appearance (subjective and of mood as it may have been) caught back a subtle half memory, half-visionary effect, treasured, doubtless, in farthest childhood: a plot of tender April grass, seen as through a moist depth of various colors, ineffable blue, violet, mauve, and green, such as would have been produced had a rainbow been wrecked, and there poured out in aerial liquid suffusion! Violets amid the grass, and all blended in a spring rain, may have been the genesis of this dream-memory. Indeed, if there is any flower dear to Mnemosyne and suitable for her emblem, the violet would

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