failure in good taste. An assent, such as this, to the preferences
of others, might seem to be the weakest of motives, and the rectitude
it could determine the least considerable element in a moral life.
Yet here, according to Cornelius Fronto, was in truth the revealing
example, albeit operating upon comparative trifles, of the general
principle required. There was one great idea associated with which
that determination to conform to precedent was elevated into the
clearest, the fullest, the weightiest principle of moral action; a
principle under which one might subsume men's most strenuous efforts
after righteousness. And he proceeded to expound the idea of
Humanity--of a universal commonwealth of mind, which [10] becomes
explicit, and as if incarnate, in a select communion of just men made
perfect.

Ho kosmos hosanei polis estin+--the world is as it were a commonwealth,
a city: and there are observances, customs, usages, actually current
in it, things our friends and companions will expect of us, as the
condition of our living there with them at all, as really their peers
or fellow-citizens. Those observances were, indeed, the creation of
a visible or invisible aristocracy in it, whose actual manners, whose
preferences from of old, become now a weighty tradition as to the way
in which things should or should not be done, are like a music, to
which the intercourse of life proceeds--such a music as no one who
had once caught its harmonies would willingly jar. In this way, the
becoming, as in Greek--to prepon: or ta ethe+ mores, manners, as both
Greeks and Romans said, would indeed be a comprehensive term for
duty. Righteousness would be, in the words of "Caesar" himself, of
the philosophic Aurelius, but a "following of the reasonable will of
the oldest, the most venerable, of cities, of polities--of the royal,
the law-giving element, therein--forasmuch as we are citizens also in