himself; and it may be doubted whether a report of one of his actual
conversations would have seemed more truly genuine.

This is a rare gift often sought indeed yet sought in vain not only by
dramatists who have very [Footnote 1 _Deflexit jam aliquantul im_]
seldom attained it but by authors of a very great diversity of type and
culture. One who undertakes to personate a character belonging to an age
not his own hardly ever fails of manifest anachronisms. The author finds
it utterly impossible to fit the antique mask so closely as not now and
then to show through its chinks his own more modern features, while this
form of internal evidence never fails to betray an intended forgery
however skilfully wrought. On the other hand there is no surer proof of
the genuineness ot a work purporting to be of an earlier but alleged to
be of a later origin than the absence of all tokens of a time subsequent
to the earliest date claimed for it. [Footnote: Thus among the many
proofs of the genuineness of our canonical Gospels perhaps none is more
conclusive than the fact that though evidently written by unskilled men
they contain not a trace or token of certain opinions known to have been
rife even before the close of the first Christian century; while the (so
called) apocryphal Gospels bear, throughout, such vestiges of their
later origin as would neutralize the strongest testimony imaginable in
behalf of their primitive antiquity.]

In connection with this work it should be borne in mind that the special
duties of friendship constituted an essential department of ethics in
the ancient world and that the relation of friend to friend was regarded
as on the same plane with that of brother to brother. No treatise on
morals would have been thought complete had this subject been omitted.
Not a few modern writers have attempted the formal treatment of
friendship but while the relation of kindred minds and souls has lost