credit has been lost. He is convinced that never has there been such a fall as his; he measures it by all the height of his former position of honour and influence. He has brought ruin not only on himself but on his dear ones at home; he does not trust himself to meet his brother Quintus, now returning home from his province; they would both be too much unmanned. Throughout he despairs of any improvement in the situation, and turns a deaf ear to the hopes which his friends hold out to him.
Lessing in his famous treatise on the Laocoön has drawn an interesting contrast between the conventions of ancient and modern life with regard to the manifestations of pain and grief. The northern peoples of Europe have inherited notions of the dignity of stoical endurance, which, though far less thorough than those of some barbaric races, lead us to consider tears and lamentations as unworthy of a man. The Greeks and, to a certain extent, the Romans were more natural in their utterance of their feelings. Philoctetes can howl from the pain of his wound, and Achilles roll on the sand in the agony of his bereavement, without degradation or loss of sympathy. It is said[1] that the modern Italians show something of the same unconventionality and absence of self-restraint.
In Cicero we find these characteristics carried an extreme. Stoical reserve is sadly wanting in him. The versatile intelligence, the susceptibility to impressions, the quick wit and the genial receptiveness,
- ↑ See Adolphus Trollope's Beppo the Conscript, ch. 7 (the Bad Number).
