and the Dutch burned the English fleet at Chatham.  Charles shut up the Exchequer, and Gallienus debased the coinage.  Charles accepted a pension from Louis XIV., and Gallienus devolved the burden of his Eastern provinces on a Syrian Emir.  Their tastes and pursuits were as similar as their histories.  Charles excelled as a wit and a critic; Gallienus as a poet and a gastronomer.  Charles was curious about chemistry, and founded the Royal Society.  In the third century the conception of the systematic investigation of nature did not exist.  Gallienus, therefore, could not patronise exact science; and the great literary light of the age, Longinus, irradiated the court of Palmyra.  But the Emperor bestowed his favour in ample measure on the chief contemporary philosopher, Plotinus, who strove to unite the characters of Plato and Pythagoras, of sage and seer.  Like Schelling in time to come, he maintained the necessity of a special organ for the apprehension of philosophy, without perceiving that he thereby proclaimed philosophy bankrupt, and placed himself on the level of the Oriental hierophants, with whose sublime quackeries the modest sage could not hope to contend.  So extreme was his humility, that he would not claim to have been consciously united to the Divinity more than four times in his life; without condemning magic and thaumaturgy, he left their practice to more adventurous spirits, and contented himself with the occasional visits of a familiar demon in the shape of a serpent.  He experienced, however, frequent visitations of trance or ecstasy, sometimes lasting for a long period; and it may have been in one of these that he was inspired by the idea of asking the Emperor for a decayed city in Campania, there to establish a philosophic commonwealth as nearly upon the model of Plato’s Republic as the degeneracy of the times would allow.

“I cannot,” said Gallienus, when the project had been explained to him, “object in principle to aught so festive and jocose.  The age is turned upside down; its comedians are lamentable, and its sages ludicrous.  It must moreover, I apprehend, be sated with the earthquakes, famines, pestilences, and barbarian invasions with which it hath been exclusively regaled for so long, and must crave something enlivening, of the nature of thy proposition.  But whether, when we arrive at the consideration of ways and means, I shall find my interview with my treasurer enlivening, is gravely to be questioned.  I have heard homilies enough on my prodigality, which merely means that I prefer spending my treasures on myself to saving them for my successor, whose title will probably have been acquired by cutting my throat.”