ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Murray's words: 'essentially the thing that is left when all other moral sanctions fail',[1] that sense which made Francesco Barberini, in his own words, 'blush more deeply than his cardinal's crimson at the virtues of this heathen'.[2]
Ch. 7. The godlike life (ch. 5) and the leisure from alien imaginations may be disturbed by the allurement of some sense-image from without or by the sense of a wrong done to one by a neighbour. The way to correct this impression is to use the intrusive imagination, with the impulse which inevitably follows it, or the opposition of another's will, to prompt the right response in a virtuous activity.[3] This will correct the tendency to wander from the smooth life of virtue. There is a second danger, a different kind of instability. Beware of employing your leisure to drift from one distraction, as we say, to another.
Marcus refers to the 'busy idleness', the 'listless occupation' satirized by Horace. Lucretius[4] says, 'whose very life is little more than death'; Seneca that men are sick with a sickness which is death; they seek retreats yet cannot escape the fear of death.[5] Similarly Addison speaks of such dilettanti as 'not moribund but dead'. The other aspect, the aimlessness of such living, is vividly suggested by Ennius:[6] 'we go here, then there; arrived there, it is our pleasure to leave, our mind wanders without fixed purpose, praeterpropter vitam vivitur'. Seneca compares them to sailors without a star to give them a bearing.
Ch. 8. This chapter should follow ch. 6, just as ch. 9 runs well after ch. 7.
Montaigne[7] illustrates the sense: '"Do thy own work and know thyself", of which two parts, both the one and the other generally comprehend our whole duty, and do each of them in like manner involve the other; for who will do his own work aright will find that his first lesson is to know what he is and that which is proper to himself; and who rightly understands himself will never mistake another man's work for his own, but will love
- ↑ l.c. p. 90.
- ↑ 'ti farà piu della porpora arrossire', in the dedication to his translation of Marcus into Italian, 1675.
- ↑ M. Ant. iv. 1; v. 20; vi. 50.
- ↑ 'mortua cui vita est prope iam vivo atque videnti', Lucr. 3. 1046 (Dryden' translation, line 263).
- ↑ See the brilliant pages in De Brev. Vitae, ch. 2.
- ↑ Ennius, Sc. 240 ed. Vahlen.
- ↑ Essais, i. 3 (Cotton).
