Aristippus, wishing to specify the notion, placed pleasure as the germ of all human felicity.

A variation from his maxims appears in his successor, Theodorus, the atheist, or theist, who taught that joy and sorrow were the objects of human desire or hate; and that reason leads to one, as irrationality tends to the other on this he founded the selfish notion that man was independent, and that only the fool seeks friendship, or affects patriotism. The Socratic law of moderation being abandoned, the arrogance of ideal self-sufficiency soon induced Theodorus and his school to deny the existence of God, and to treat the religion of his countrymen as a credulous superstition. The Cyrenaic philosophy was subsequently brought by Hegesias to a denial of any influence upon man, who, if wise, he said, would regard life and death with equal indifference; and Anniceris, another disciple, completed the pyramid of error by maintaining that life was bestowed for no general purpose, but simply to afford pleasure by the selfish gratification of its several acts. Thus, as this branch of the Socratic system grew wider apart from the stem, so it bore the fruit both of Cynical brutality and Epicurean vice; the first of which

will afford us subject of remark in the history of Antisthenes and his successors.

This philosopher, who first palmed upon Greece the deception of pretended insensibility, for a true moral discipline worthy of man's pursuit, was an Athenian, originally the disciple of Gorgias the Sophist, and was born about the ninetieth Olympiad. Though himself a teacher, he relinquished his profession to become once more a pupil under Socrates. Cynicism was rather the product of his own disposition, than of system founded on any affinity to the true Socratic method; and the character of his pupil was clearly read by the great Athenian teacher, who remarked, one day, when he observed the future Cynic proud of an affected asceticism as he paraded the porch in a threadbare dress, "Antisthenes, you carry your contempt of dress too far-I see thy vanity through the holes of thy coat." The exhibition of the pride that aped humility, was lost upon one who had borne the extremes of heat and cold without the pomp of pretended virtue; and had he truly imbibed the ethical spirit of the moralist, Antisthenes would have discovered that he needed not to become a savage, in order to avoid the slavery of sense. To despise alike

the sympathies and the wants of our common nature, to obtrude ill temper and moroseness upon the innocent enjoyments of life, to outrage society by carelessness and indecorum, he thought were the best means of proving a man to be placed above his fellows; instead of which, he incurred the worst evils of the opposite extreme-he fell below them. The locality in which he fixed his school was the Cynosarges, or "temple of the white dog," a circumstance which, attaching the name of Cynic to his sect, attributed to it a currish and querulous snappishness and snarling petulance which it affected. During the latter period of his life, the temper of Antisthenes became so intolerable, and his manners so offensive, that he was abandoned by all his followers, except Diogenes, who offered him a dagger to relieve him from the pain of which he complained: but Antisthenes rejoined, "That though he wished to be released from agony, he did not desire to quit life"-a singular inconsistency in one who, considering the character of his fellow-men so bad as for them to praise only what was evil, could possess no pleasant association with this existence; and who, nevertheless, proved by his conduct his unfitness for another.

The most favourable view, therefore, that we can take of this philosopher, consists in the supposition that, from disgust at national effeminacy, he wished to restore his country to the stern morality of a former age. But in Antisthenes, as in his disciple, Diogenes of Sinope, (of whom more is known,) we trace the same erroneous neglect of the Socratic principle of moderation, which, if observed, would have prevented the evil and enforced the benefit of strict selfdiscipline. Diogenes first appears before us in a disreputable character, for he was driven from his country for debasing the coin; but we agree with those who hold that many of the vices attributed to him are unjustly alleged, and that they originated in the vulgar tendency, especially in a debased age, to slander and misrepresent any example which condemns prevailing immorality. One trait of a favourable nature is presented in the circumstance of Xeniades, a Corinthian-who had purchased Diogenes in the slave-market, where he had been exposed for sale by some pirates, who had captured him in a voyage-declaring that he blessed the day when the philosopher became the tutor to his children, so uprightly had he discharged his duty in that capacity.

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On his first application, his pertinacity alone obtained him admission to the lectures of Antisthenes, for the morose Cynic endeavoured to drive him away from his door by violence. "Strike me," was the firm language of his resolute follower, "but never shall stick hard enough, O Antisthenes, to drive me from your presence, whilst there is any information to be gained from your acquaintance!" He soon exceeded his master in singularity and fame, nor distinguished himself only by wearing the Cynic garment, but was in the habit of walking about the streets with a tub in which he usually slept. Alexander the Great, hearing of his notoriety, visited him, and requested to know in what he could oblige him; "Only by getting out of my sunshine," was the reply, which pleased the Macedonian monarch perhaps the more, by its moderation of desire, inasmuch as men generally affect to

esteem that virtue of which themselves are most incapable notwithstanding the general tenor of the philosopher's life demonstrates that pride is not least predominant in the ostentatious poverty of a tattered robe. It was this affectation of the Cynic that elicited the just rebuke of Plato, when, at a splendid feast given by the