(c) "Tulit crimen iniqui justus" (i. m. 5). Our thoughts naturally go back to "the just for the unjust," but Boethius is here merely enlarging on the unrighteous sentence passed on himself.

(d) "Iam vos secunda mors manet (ii. m. 7). The "mors secunda" of which he sings refers to the loss of renown; it may indeed be compared for the thought with Eccles. ix. 10: "Quodcunque facere potest manus tua, instanter operare; quia nec opus, nec ratio, nec sapientia, nec scientia erunt apud inferos, quo tu properas"; but certainly not with θάνατος ὁ δεύτερος of the Apocalypse.

(e) "Huc omnes pariter venite capti quos ligat fallax . . . libido." (iii. m. 10). These remarkable words appear at first sight to have been, and very possibly were, suggested by the Sermon on the Mount. But though the wording is similar, the feeling is very different.

(f) "Est igitur summum bonum, quod regit cuncta fortiter, suaviterque disponit" (iii. pr. 12). This is strangely like Wisd. viii. 1: "Attingit vero a fine usque ad finem fortiter et disponit suaviter "; indeed it is altogether too like to be anything but a reminiscence. But just as in the last quotation, so here, similarity of expression by no means implies identity of thought. And if we regard Boethius as a Chris

tian by outward profession at least, there is nothing surprising in such echoes of Scripture. It is rather a cause for wonder that in the last utterance of a writer whom we believe to have produced serious disquisitions on subtle points of Christian doctrine, such echoes are not far more frequent.

(g) "Nam ut quidam me quoque excellentior ait: ἄνδρος δὴ ἱέρον δέμας αἴθερες οἰκοδομῆσαν ” (iv. pr. 6). Many and various have been the conjectures offered as to who this "some one more excellent than Philosophy" can be almost as numerous as the attempts at emending the manifestly corrupt text.1 Sources as wide apart as Hermes Trismegistus and God speaking to us by the mouth of Christian Theology have been suggested—this last by Hildebrand (op. cit., p. 141), who, while he despairs of hitting on the right reading, declares the thought to be Christian. Now to my mind both thought and expression appear thoroughly Platonic, and Hildebrand's arguments to the contrary altogether unsatisfactory. There is a passage in the Second Alcibiades, § 292, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the words in question. Socrates says: Αρ ̓ οὖν οὐχὶ εἰδώς τι πλέον ἡμῶν ὁ

1 Vide Peiper's critical note on the passage. The "quidam me excellentior" he does not hesitate to identify with Parmenides, and compares Parm. πepl púσews, 116 and 146, seqq.

ποιητής, οὗ καὶ ἐν ἀρχῇ τοῦ λόγου ἐπεμνήσθην, τὰ δεινὰ καὶ εὐχομένους ἀπαλέξειν ἐκέλευεν ; 1

The phraseology, indeed, does recall that of Ps. xxxiv. 20, Wisd. iii. 1, &c., just as the "vasa vilia et vasa pretiosa" of iv. pr. 1 recall the words of St Paul in 2 Tim. ii. 21, and the "Huc omnes pariter venite" of iii. m. 10, the words of Christ in Matt. xi. 28. And we should perhaps explain them as an unconscious reminiscence of familiar expressions, whose original application Boethius was not particularly careful to bear in mind. It is significant that he always acknowledges a debt to Plato or Aristotle : even in places where he does not mention them by name, the teaching of the Academic or of his great pupil is framed in language that leaves no shadow of a doubt as to the source from which it springs.

The circumstances of Boethius's life make it almost impossible to believe that he was other than a professing Christian before he fell in disgrace. How can this profession be reconciled with the system we have just been examining—a system which, while it is not directly antagonistic to Christianity, bears the impress of absolute indifference to it? The general opinion on the subject may be roughly divided into

1 Since writing the above, I have seen a note by Mirandol in his translation (Paris, 1861), where this passage of Plato is quoted.

two classes. First, there are those for whom the 'Consolation' is an insurmountable obstacle to the theological tracts; secondly, there are those who accept the tracts and regard the Consolation' as a sort of palinode, the notification of the writer's final withdrawal from the Christian faith. I shall reserve all argument with the former of these classes until the tracts come under consideration. The other view makes it exceedingly difficult to account for such an unusual change of front. We should have to believe that Boethius felt that after all, logic, whether applied to questions of metaphysic or theology, was but cold comfort in the prison-cell or on the scaffold; and so explain the pronouncedly Platonic turn his philosophy takes in the 'Consolation,’ after having been based on Aristotle hitherto, and fostered by a constant worship of dialectic. We must then class Boethius with those hearers of the Word whom our Lord likened to the stony ground on which the blessed seed falls, who have no root in themselves, and stumble under the stroke of persecution. One could better have understood an open attack on the religion that has profited him so little— some fierce revulsion against a faith that failed him so utterly in his hour of need. Now there seems to me to be an alternative explanation at once simpler

and more in accord with common experience. The Consolation' is intensely artificial. Every page of it smells of the lamp. The verses in it have the smoothness and polish of marble, but they have also its coldness. Here is nothing that suggests a heart beating itself out against the bars of its prison. The prose, though it sometimes rises to a certain height of passion, often stiffens into the dull formality of a logical treatise. So, too, many of the themes elaborated, the tricks of Fortune, the misery of the wicked, and the like, are hardly of a kind to lead one to look on the work as a definite statement of ultimate religious conviction. There is really little depth of argument in the earlier books, and the later ones are in the main rather speculative than devout.

Bearing all this in mind, let us now see what Boethius was doing when Philosophy entered to him. He was writing poetry to pass the time and ease his pain. This, to my thinking, gives the clue to the motive of the Consolation.' The gloom and silence of the dungeon, the terrible consciousness of desertion by his friends, the enforced idleness, would have driven any ordinary man mad, much more one of Boethius's vast mental activity and insatiate appetite for work. He tries verse-writing, but finds that it