enormously popular, running through more than sixteen editions. I
think we may conjecture that Shakespeare had seen Lodge's
translation, from several allusions to philosophy, to that
impossible conception "the wise man," and especially from a passage
in "All's Well that ends Well," which seems to breathe the very
spirit of "De Beneficiis."

"'Tis pity--
That wishing well had not a body in it
Which might be felt: that we, the poorer born,
Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes,
Might with effects of them follow our friends
And show what we alone must think; which never
Returns us thanks."

All's Well that ends Well," Act i. sc. 1.

Though, if this will not fit the supposed date of that play, he may
have taken the idea from "The Woorke of Lucius Annaeus Seneca
concerning Benefyting, that is too say, the dooing, receyving, and
requyting of good turnes, translated out of Latin by A. Golding. J.
Day, London, 1578." And even during the Restoration, Pepys's ideal
of virtuous and lettered seclusion is a country house in whose
garden he might sit on summer afternoons with his friend, Sir W.
Coventry, "it maybe, to read a chapter of Seneca." In sharp
contrast to this is Vahlen's preface to the minor Dialogues, which
he edited after the death of his friend Koch, who had begun that
work, in which he remarks that "he has read much of this writer, in
order to perfect his knowledge of Latin, for otherwise he neither
admires his artificial subtleties of thought, nor his childish