extravagant paradoxes of the Stoics. But, for all that, he touches the
great and eternal commonplaces of human occasion--friendship, health,
bereavement, riches, poverty, death--with a hand that places him high
among the wise masters of life. All through the ages men tossed in the
beating waves of circumstance have found more abundantly in the essays
and letters of Seneca than in any other secular writer words of good
counsel and comfort. And let this fact not pass, without notice of the
light that it sheds on the fact of the unity of literature, and of
the absurdity of setting a wide gulf between ancient or classical
literature and modern, as if under all dialects the partakers in
Graeco-Roman civilisation, whether in Athens, Rome, Paris, Weimar,
Edinburgh, London, Dublin, were not the heirs of a great common stock
of thought as well as of speech.

I certainly do not mean anything so absurd as that the moralities,
whether major or minor, whether affecting the foundation of conduct or
the surface of manners, remain fixed. On the contrary, one of the most
interesting things in literature is to mark the shifts and changes in
men's standards. For instance, Boswell tells a curious story of the
first occasion on which Johnson met Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two ladies of
the company were regretting the death of a friend to whom they owed
great obligations. Reynolds observed that they had at any rate the
comfort of being relieved from a debt of gratitude. The ladies were
naturally shocked at this singular alleviation of their grief, but
Johnson defended it in his clear and forcible manner, and, says
Boswell, "was much pleased with the mind, the fair view of human
nature, that it exhibited, like some of the reflections of
Rochefoucauld." On the strength of it he went home with Reynolds,
supped with him, and was his friend for life. No moralist with a
reputation to lose would like to back Reynolds's remark in the