he could not have found two writers better fitted to form the character
of a soldier and a man. Smith is almost unknown and forgotten in
England, his native country, but not in America, where he saved the
young colony of Virginia. He was great in his heroic mind and his deeds
in arms, but greater still in the nobleness of his character. For a
man's greatness lies not in wealth and station, as the vulgar believe,
nor yet in his intellectual capacity, which is often associated with
the meanest moral character, the most abject servility to those in high
places, and arrogance to the poor and lowly; but a man's true greatness
lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life, founded on a
just estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent
self-examination, and a steady obedience to the rule which he knows to
be right, without troubling himself, as the emperor says he should not,
about what others may think or say, or whether they do or do not do that
which he thinks and says and does.




THE PHILOSOPHY

OF

MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONIUS


It has been said that the Stoic philosophy first showed its real value
when it passed from Greece to Rome. The doctrines of Zeno and his
successors were well suited to the gravity and practical good sense of
the Romans; and even in the Republican period we have an example of a