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'Spoken like a philosopher," replied the other; "I see you did not study Aristotle's rules respecting happiness in vain. But what is your present pursuit? Have you retired into these woods alone, to solve any of those difficulties which yet perplex our inquiries? Are you considering the grand question, how Aristotle and Plato are to be reconciled; and have you satisfied yourself whether Pythagoras first learned the doctrine of abstract essences in this land?"

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as if

"You speak," said Rutilius, you were still amidst the groves of Academus. I can remember the intense interest which such inquiries then excited; but of late I have found in them less satisfaction."

"I suspect that you are suffering under the madness of love."

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No," replied the young man, rather faintly; "I am not in love. My affliction is, that I have no object; I have tried every thing—all ends in disappointment."

"If this is your feeling," said the philosopher, "follow me. I am staying for a time in Tyre, where I have kinsmen; and I promise to open to you sufficient sources of interest to satisfy your mind. Your state," he added, as they walked together along the shore, "is not uncommon, though it belongs only to superior understandings, such as yours was shewn to be during your stay at Athens. It is enough for men in general to be employed in seek

ing for wealth, or expending it; to be hewers of wood or drawers of water for the real masters of the world. The cattle who draw a wagon seem to be moving it; but it is the directing mind which rules its motion, to which the whole machine is subservient. So it is with those of us who have heart to rise superior to the vulgar objects, of which you appear to have discerned the vanity. We draw near to the true Source of power; we are swallowed up in Him; we discern the secrets of the universe in our mysterious intercourse with its Author; we look behind the veil of matter, perceive its vanity, and are lost in the fruition of the Godhead. This is the sublime life which was so long led by my master Plotinus, and to which I myself am proud to have attained. Yes," he continued, with a sort of frenzied inspiration, "why need I further linger, as Hesiod says, about rock or tree: was not I who speak to you but yesterday so entranced with the spectacle of the world of thought, that for a season I totally lost myself, my spirit travelled forth and held intercourse with the only true reality; and I perceived that there is no existence except in thought?" He continued to talk in this manner as he walked homewards, accompanied by Rutilius, who was a good deal impressed, as well by the confidence as the nature of his promises. He soon saw that the young man was dissatisfied by the grossness of idolatry ;

1 Porphyry, Life of Plotinus.

but that no other system had as yet taken possession of his mind. "Depend upon it," he exclaimed, "your meeting me will be exactly like Plotinus's first entrance into the school of Ammonius, when he turned round, and said to his friend, 'This is the very man I was in search of." I see that you long for something higher than the low cares of this world can give, and yet that the barrenness of the ordinary idol-worship gives you no content. To whom then ought you to come, but to such as I am? The philosopher is the priest of the supreme God; his study is the whole of nature, and those various operations of which it is the scene. The ordinary priests worship none but the inferior Deities."

Before Rutilius took his leave, he asked his companion's name, that he might visit him next morning.

"Here," said the philosopher, "I pass by my hereditary name of Malchus. At Athens you may

remember that I was called, after the custom of the Greeks, by one borrowed from their own language. My own name in our ancient tongue, which is nearly the same with that of the older sacred writings of the Christians, means king; and because the Tyrian monarchs were clad in their native purple, my brother philosophers, from the Greek name for that colour, call me Porphyry."

It was with this celebrated enemy of the Christian faith that Rutilius had fallen in; and to him he 1 Porphyry, Life of Plotinus.

2 Porphyry on Abstinence, ii. 37.

went the next morning, curious as well to see how far he could fulfil his promise, as to learn something respecting that singular sect of the younger Platonists, which had grown up within a few years, and numbered Porphyry among its chief leaders. With the general history of the Greek philosophy Rutilius had become familiar while he lived at Athens. He knew that it dated to the time of Socrates as the grand era when truth and reason began to prevail. Till then those who called themselves wise men had only amused their hearers with groundless speculations on the nature and origin of the world; some saying that every thing consisted of watery, others of earthy atoms; but no one attending to the practical questions which men were interested to know. Every philosopher whom he had attended referred to Socrates as the author of his inquiries. This great man had shewn his fellows that their main business was the study of themselves; that it was idle to speculate about the universe around, till the little universe of man's own heart was at peace. And by thus directing them to a practical subject, and one in which they could make some real progress, he had given a new stimulus to the reasoning powers, which had even made men better observers of outward nature. This Rutilius had particularly observed in the instance of Aristotle, who had made the first accurate inquiry into natural history. His celebrated book on animals, as well as the discoveries of Archimedes, had only been the

carrying of the Socratic method from the moral into the natural world. When Rutilius was at Athens, he had found those four schools of philosophers still flourishing, which had arisen from the impulse given by Socrates to the world of thought. Besides the Platonists or Academics, and the Peripatetic philosophers, who called Aristotle their master, he had been a hearer of the Stoics and the Epicureans. The last he had never been able to endure; he had seen their principles brought forward as the excuse for the sensuality of the period, which his mind was naturally too refined to relish; and though he knew that some metaphysical doctors of this school professed that no such consequences followed from their arguments, yet he could not but judge their doctrine by its ordinary effects. With the Stoics he had been much better pleased, particularly by their attention to the practical rules of moral and political philosophy. The philosophers of the Lyceum and Academy, as the disciples of Aristotle and Plato were respectively called, though they seemed to him to deal in moral principles of a far higher tone than those of the Stoics-referring man to the sense of original duty, while the Stoics had appealed chiefly to his pride of heart-had yet perplexed him by recurring so constantly to metaphysical subtleties. Their constant topic was the origin of men's ideas, and the degree of evidence that what was presented to him by his senses had any existence independent of himself. By speculations of this kind, the followers