Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 179which that opinion was registered rather than inany real superiority or inferiority, often led himto anticipate the ideas of a very distant future.Quintilian describes him as no great philosopher('in philosophia parum diligens but'), praises himas a moral instructor of distinction whose worksare to be studied— by those able to sift the goodfrom the bad— for the sake of the striking thoughtswith which they abound. He allows him a readywit, flowing perhaps too easily from a perennialsource, industry, and a wide knowledge of naturalhistory, though he remarks that he was sometimesmisled by those whom he had commissionedto make investigations but with all this he;chargeshim with an absolute lack of judgment and withbeing the chief corrupter of eloquence and introducerof new methods in composition which utterlyunfitted him to guide the taste of the youthof his generation, in whose hands for a timehis books alone were to be found. He denounceshim, indeed, as a sort of literary anarchist, whoseinfluence on the manner of his age was disastrous,and having once again admitted that there wasmuch in his works to approve, much even to admire,by those who could distinguish (andwhose taste was sufficiently formed this,would be good practice), he sums up hiswith the remark that itfor thosehe says,criticismwas a pity one capableof doing what he pleased should not more often^have been pleased with better things. Quintilian,' ^Digna enim fuit ilia natura, quae meliora vellet, quae quodvoluit effecit.' One is reminded of Jonson's reply to Shakespeare'sfellow-players, who boasted that he had never blotted a line,'"Would he had blotted a thousand.'