pains; it makes wonderful promises, I am told, about the Happiness in
store for those who reach the summit; for none but they shall enter into
full possession of the true Good. The next point you must help me with--
whether you have ever met such a Stoic, such a pattern of Stoicism, as to
be unconscious of pain, untempted by pleasure, free from wrath, superior
to envy, contemptuous of wealth, and, in one word, Happy; such should the
example and model of the Virtuous life be; for any one who falls short in
the slightest degree, even though he is better than other men at all
points, is not complete, and in that case not yet Happy.

_Her_. I never saw such a man.

_Ly_. I am glad you do not palter with the truth. But what are your hopes
in pursuing philosophy, then? You see that neither your own teacher, nor
his, nor his again, and so on to the tenth generation, has been absolutely
wise and so attained Happiness. It will not serve you to say that it is
enough to get near Happiness; that is no good; a person on the doorstep is
just as much outside and in the air as another a long way off, though with
the difference that the former is tantalized by a nearer view. So it is to
get into the neighbourhood of Happiness--I will grant you so much--that
you toil like this, wearing yourself away, letting this great portion of
your life slip from you, while you are sunk in dullness and wakeful
weariness; and you are to go on with it for twenty more years at the
least, you tell me, to take your place when you are eighty--always
assuming some one to assure you that length of days--in the ranks of the
not yet Happy. Or perhaps you reckon on being the exception; you are to
crown your pursuit by attaining what many a good man before you, swifter
far, has pursued and never overtaken.

Well, overtake it, if that is your plan, grasp it and have it whole, this