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The worthy man spent two hours with me, without saying a word on the subject of literature, but to please me he had no need to talk of books, for he was a disciple of Epicurus and Socrates, and the evening was spent in telling little stories, in bursts of laughter, and in accounts of the various kinds of pleasure obtainable at Geneva.
For myself, while shrinking from all illnesses, I especially shrink from that in regard to which the Stoics attack your friend Epicurus for saying that "he suffered from strangury and pains in the bowels" the latter of which complaints they attribute to gluttony, the former to a still graver indulgence. I had been really much afraid of dysentery.
But the contempt of death from corporal animosity promoteth not our felicity. They may sit in the orchestra and noblest seats of heaven who have held up shaking hands in the fire, and humanly contended for glory. Meanwhile, Epicurus lies deep in Dante's hell, wherein we meet with tombs inclosing souls which denied their immortalities.
"My father did not forbid our continuing this pastime, but strictly prohibited our calling ourselves 'Epicureans' outside of the garden, for this noble name had since gained among the people a significance wholly alien. Epicurus says that true pleasure is to be found only in peace of mind and absence of pain."
A little daughter half-playfully and half-wilfully, announced her intention to follow her own pleasure in a certain case. "Milicent is a Hedonist," said the guest, and the Oxford scholar brought Aristippus and Epicurus into odd conjunction with a Mississippi Valley breakfast-table. He laid aside his white woollen suit, but his attire remained unconventional, not to say outré.
Of such general extent is that remark of Cicero, in relation to Epicurus the Atheist, of whom he observed that he of all men dreaded most those things which he contemned Death and the Gods." Merely because it was supper time, and in the neighborhood of a bath, Mr. Hobbes must have the fate of Sextus Roscius. What logic was there in this, unless to a man who was always dreaming of murder?
In the view of Epicurus, the chief miseries of life arose, not from bodily pains, but partly from delusions of hope, and exaggerated aspirations for wealth, honours, power, &c., in all which the objects appeared most seductive from a distance, inciting man to lawless violence and treachery, while in the reality they were always disappointments, and generally something worse; partly, and still more, from the delusions of fear.
"Let me train them to be human beings," replied Archibius gravely, "and preserve them from the desire to enter the lists with the gods. From the simple Cleopatra in the garden of Epicurus, who was a delight to the good and wise, you became the new Isis, to whom the multitude raised hearts, eyes, and hands, dazzled and blinded.
Pope is nobody; or in Newmarket language, if ranked against Chrysippus, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Epicurus, he would be found 'nowhere. He is reduced, therefore, at one blow to the level of a pulpit moralist, or mere applier of moral laws to human actions.
It was an occasion for a Democritus, nay, for an Epicurus or a Metrodorus, perhaps, a man whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by scepticism and insight, one who, if he could not detect the precise imposture, would at any rate have been perfectly certain that, though this escaped him, the whole thing was a lie and an impossibility.
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