SOURCE: “Matthew Arnold and Marcus Aurelius,” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. III, No. 1, Winter, 1963, pp. 555-66.

In the following essay, Ebel critiques an essay on Aurelius written by Matthew Arnold, finding it ambiguous, full of shifts and twists, but clearly revealing Arnold's sense of affinity with Aurelius.

In 1863 Matthew Arnold had, in his own later words, “been thinking much of Marcus Aurelius and his times.”¹ One result of his thinking was an essay entitled “Marcus Aurelius”—a review of George Long's rendering of the Meditations. A careful examination of this essay indicates how deeply involved Arnold in fact became with the Stoic Emperor and his times and how central this involvement was in the development of his thought.

I.

Arnold's essay begins with a defense of “Christian morality” against certain strictures of John Stuart Mill, who had compared it unfavorably, in On Liberty, to “the best...