regret, for he was a consistent vegetarian.
However, we are advancing too rapidly, and we must discuss Plotinus

more in order. His name is very dear to mystic novelists, like the
author of "Zanoni." They always describe their favourite hero as

"deep in Plotinus or Iamblichus," and I venture to think that nearly
represents the depth of their own explorations. We do not know

exactly when Plotinus was born. Like many ladies he used to wrap up
his age in a mystery, observing that these petty details about the

body (a mere husk of flesh binding the soul) were of no importance.
He was not weaned till he was eight years old, a singular

circumstance. Having a turn for philosophy, he attended the schools
of Alexandria, concerning which Kingsley's "Hypatia" is the most

accessible authority.
All these anecdotes, I should have said, we learn from Porphyry, the

Tyrian, who was a kind of Boswell to Plotinus. The philosopher
himself often reminds me of Dr. Johnson, especially as Dr. Johnson

is described by Mr. Carlyle. Just as the good doctor was a sound
Churchman in the beginning of the age of new ideas, so Plotinus was

a sound pagan in the beginning of the triumph of Christianity.
Like Johnson, Plotinus was lazy and energetic and short-sighted. He

wrote a very large number of treatises, but he never took the
trouble to read through them when once they were written, because

his eyes were weak. He was superstitious, like Dr. Johnson, yet he
had lucid intervals of common sense, when he laughed at the

superstitions of his disciples. Like Dr. Johnson, he was always
begirt by disciples, men and women, Bozzys and Thrales. He was so

full of honour and charity, that his house was crowded with persons
in need of help and friendly care. Though he lived so much in the

clouds and among philosophical abstractions, he was an excellent man
of business. Though a philosopher he was pious, and was courageous,

dreading the plague no more than the good doctor dreaded the tempest
that fell on him when he was voyaging to Coll.

You will admit that the parallel is pretty close for an historical
parallel, despite the differences between the ascetic of Wolf-town

and the sage of Bolt Court, hard by Fleet Street!
To return to the education of Plotinus. He was twenty-eight when he

went up to the University of Alexandria. For eleven years he
diligently attended the lectures of Ammonius. Then he went on the

Emperor Gordian's expedition to the East, hoping to learn the
philosophy of the Hindus. The Upanishads would have puzzled

Plotinus, had he reached India; but he never did. Gordian's army
was defeated in Mesopotamia, no "blessed word" to Gordian, and

Plotinus hardly escaped with his life. He must have felt like
Stendhal on the retreat from Moscow.

From Syria his friend and disciple Amelius led him to Rome, and
here, as novelists say, "a curious thing happened." There was in

Rome an Egyptian priest, who offered to raise up the Demon, or
Guardian Angel, of Plotinus in visible form. But there was only one

pure spot in all Rome, so said the priest, and this spot was the
Temple of Isis. Here the seance was held, and no demon appeared,

but a regular God of one of the first circles. So terrified was an
onlooker that he crushed to death the living birds which he held in

his hands for some ritual or magical purpose.
It was a curious scene, a cosmopolitan confusion of Egypt, Rome,

Isis, table-turning, the late Mr. Home, religion, and mummery, while
Christian hymns of the early Church were being sung, perhaps in the

garrets around, outside the Temple of Isis. The discovery that he
had a god for his guardian angel gave Plotinus plenty of confidence

in dealing with rival philosophers. For example, Alexandrinus
Olympius, another mystic, tried magical arts against Plotinus. But

Alexandrinus, suddenly doubling up during lecture with unaffected
agony, cried, "Great virtue hath the soul of Plotinus, for my spells

have returned against myself." As for Plotinus, he remarked among
his disciples, "Now the body of Alexandrinus is collapsing like an

empty purse."
How diverting it would be, Lady Violet, if our modern

controversialists had those accomplishments, and if Mr. Max Muller
could, literally, "double up" Professor Whitney, or if any one could

cause Peppmuller to collapse with his queer Homeric theory!
Plotinus had many such arts. A piece of jewellery was stolen from

one of his protegees, a lady, and he detected the thief, a servant,
by a glance. After being flogged within an inch of his life, the

servant (perhaps to save the remaining inch) confessed all.
Once when Porphyry was at a distance, and was meditating suicide,

Plotinus appeared at his side, saying, "This that thou schemest
cometh not of the pure intellect, but of black humours," and so sent

Porphyry for change of air to Sicily. This was thoroughly good
advice, but during the absence of the disciple the master died.

Porphyry did not see the great snake that glided into the wall when
Plotinus expired; he only heard of the circumstance. Plotinus's

last words were: "I am striving to release that which is divine
within us, and to merge it in the universally divine." It is a

strange mixture of philosophy and savage survival. The Zulus still
believe that the souls of the dead reappear, like the soul of

Plotinus, in the form of serpents.
Plotinus wrote against the paganizing Christians, or Gnostics. Like

all great men, he was accused of plagiarism. A defence of great men
accused of literary theft would be as valuable as Naude's work of a

like name about magic. On his death the Delphic Oracle, in very
second-rate hexameters, declared that Plotinus had become a demon.

Such was the life of Plotinus, a man of sense and virtue, and so
modest that he would not allow his portrait to be painted. His

character drew good men round him, his repute for supernatural
virtues brought "fools into a circle." What he meant by his belief

that four times he had, "whether in the body or out of the body,"
been united with the Spirit of the world, who knows? What does

Tennyson mean when he writes:
"So word by word, and line by line,

The dead man touch'd me from the past,
And all at once it seem'd at last

His living soul was flashed on mine.
And mine in his was wound and whirl'd

About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught

The deep pulsations of the world."
Mystery! We cannot fathom it; we know not the paths of the souls of

Pascal and Gordon, of Plotinus and St. Paul. They are wise with a
wisdom not of this world, or with a foolishness yet more wise.

In his practical philosophy Plotinus was an optimist, or at least he
was at war with pessimism.

"They that love God bear lightly the ways of the world--bear lightly
whatsoever befalls them of necessity in the general movement of

things." He believed in a rest that remains for the people of God,
"where they speak not one with the other; but, as we understand many

things by the eyes only, so does soul read soul in heaven, where the
spiritual body is pure, and nothing is hidden, and nothing feigned."

The arguments by which these opinions are buttressed may be called
metaphysical, and may be called worthless; the conviction, and the

beauty of the language in which it is stated, remain immortal
possessions.

Why such a man as Plotinus, with such ideas, remained a pagan, while
Christianity offered him a sympatheticrefuge, who can tell?

Probably natural conservatism, in him as in Dr. Johnson--
conservatism and taste--caused his adherence to the forms at least

of the older creeds. There was much to laugh at in Plotinus, and
much to like. But if you read him in hopes of material for strange

stories, you will be disappointed. Perhaps Lord Lytton and others
who have invoked his name in fiction (like Vivian Grey in Lord

Beaconsfield's tale) knew his name better than his doctrine. His
"Enneads," even as edited by his patient Boswell, Porphyry, are not

very light subjects of study.
LUCRETIUS

To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford.
Dear Martin,--"How individuals found religious consolation from the

creeds of ancient Greece and Rome" is, as you quote C. O. Muller, "a
very curious question." It is odd that while we have countless