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other hand, he will surely not be so unfair to our poet as to say with Sitzmann that there is hardly a verse in Boethius that does not seem to have been taken from Seneca. Boethius has borrowed freely from Nero's tutor, as Peiper's index at the end of his edition of the 'Consolation' testifies; nor indeed did he fail to lay Ovid and Horace, Virgil and Juvenal, under contribution when it suited him. But while he does not scruple to appropriate words and phrases, and sometimes whole passages, from the 'Medea,' from the 'Hippolytus,' from the 'Hercules Furens' and the 'Etaus'-in fact, from nearly every one of Seneca's plays in turn-he generally manages to give them the impress of his own genius, and his imitation is hardly of a kind to justify the old German's hasty generalisation. He sometimes shows a terseness and a brevity which are absent from the work of the older poet. Take, for instance, the fifth metrum of the second book ("Felix nimium prior ætas "), and compare with it the descriptions of the former age in the 'Medea' (301 seqq.), the 'Hippolytus' (524 seqq.), and the 'Octavia' (390 seqq.),1 where for the same idea that Boethius expresses in thirty lines Seneca employs seventy or eighty.

It is worthy of notice that the obligation of

I quote from Farnabius's edition of the tragedies (London, 1624).

Boethius to his forerunners is most apparent in his treatment of mythological subjects; while in the metra of a purely philosophical character, such as iii. 9 and 11; v. 3 and 4, he owes nothing to any Latin poet. These at any rate show that he was quite able to walk alone. But there is a class of critic that takes a singular delight in running down similarities of expression in this and that artist. It should always be remembered that, as Mr Russell Lowell wisely says, the question of originality is not one of form but of substance; and that the greatest poets-Chaucer, Shakespeare, Molière-have been the most unblushing borrowers. Plagiarism, after all, is only blameworthy and in the nature of a crime, when the loan is not repaid with interest— when the imitation falls of the original; and a writer who can put a new dress on an old thought, though he may not lay claim to originality nor rise to true greatness, will always command the applause and gratitude of his fellow-men.

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Authorities.

Friederich Nitzsch, 'Das System des Boethius. Berlin, 1860. A. Hildebrand, 'Boethius und seine Stellung zum Christenthume.' Regensburg, 1885.

SECTION I.GOD.

A THINKER of Boethius's mould and circumstances could not fail to be eclectic; and his philosophical system is a mixture of Platonism (both in its ori- ← ginal form and as Proclus and Plotinus taught it), Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. To begin with the influence exercised on him by the Attic philosopher, we see that his conception of God is purely Platonic. X To be sure, we seem to trace the teaching of Chris-X tianity in his treatment of some of the divine qualities for instance, God's prescience in relation

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to man's freewill. The compatibility of human freedom with a divine government of the world. was not a question that disturbed the older philosopher at all, who suffered to pass unchallenged the apparent contradiction between that absolute freedom of choice which he claimed for the soul, and the involuntary character of vice and ignorance. But those who are anxious to derive Boethius's theory on this subject from a Christian source, are apt to overlook the fact that it is already present in the teaching of Proclus and the Neoplatonists. And although Boethius is clearly out of sympathy with these philosophers when they attempt to foist the old heathen gods into their system as an offset against Christianity, he has none of that uncompromising hatred of all that savours of Polytheism that distinguishes the early Christian controversialists.

With characteristic caution he keeps the via media, And in a highly significant passage (iv. 6, 51) exhibits a complete indifference as to the agency by which the divine commands are put in execution. But he is careful not to fall into the Charybdis of Pantheism in avoiding the Scylla of Polytheismthat is, as far as the Physic of the Stoics is concerned. Such expressions as naturæ anima (iii. m. 9), natura rerum (i. pr. 5; iii. pr. 4), are not the

utterance of a disciple of the Porch (whose allpervading principle was immanent in nature), but are taken straight from the 'Timæus '-indeed the ninth metre of the third book is, in Nitzsch's words, nothing but ein ganzer Abschnitt des Timaeus versificirt—and his natural law is simply the expression of the will of a transcendental God, who is over and above the world, the only Father of things, the producer of all natures.

τοῦδε

On the other hand, phrases of this kind-and they abound-are very far from landing him on Christian territory. His "Father" of all things is a purely physical conception - the Tarp roude TOU TáνTOS of the 'Timæus,' and something very different from the loving Father of the New Testament. But the Deity of the Consolation' is a much more definite being than the Deity of Plato's dialogue, who is merged in the Ideas which served Him as a copy for His universe; and although it would not be difficult to find passages both in the 'Timæus' and elsewhere to match the kindly firmness, the perfect knowledge, the righteous wrath, the care for His creatures, which Boethius attributes to God, there would seem to be no doubt that the Roman philosopher had a clearer notion than the Greek of God's personal existence. Thus he does

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