62 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE 



palliation of the fond supposition, qualified as it is, with equal 

 good sense and piety, in the concluding sentences of the 

 Anabasis ; where he states that as so extraordinary a person 

 as Alexander could not have risen up in the world without 

 divine interference — ovS' s^m tow Si-lov ; so, with admiration of 

 his good qualities, and reprobation of his bad ones, Avith a 

 strict regard to truth, and public utility, he professes himself 

 his historian, writing, as he verily believes, under the same 

 divine influence that first gave being to the subject of his 

 memoir. 



Surely such a belief in heavenly interference, exciting its 

 professor to what is just and honourable, and deterring him 

 from every breach of propriety, as an historian of truth, must 

 be applauded by every fair and impartial judge of human 

 character ; and more particularly so, when in the person of a 

 Stoic, unenlightened by any philosophy but that of Epictetus, 

 it could have no other foundation than innate rectitude of 

 mind. 



Under the conviction that Arrian's expectation of posthu- 

 mous fame has been realized in general, and that my brethren 

 of the leash will award him particular honour as the first writer 

 of a Courser's Manual, I conclude this brief sketch of his life 

 and literary labours ; which might have been more full, if liis 

 biography by Dion Cassius had come down to us. 



As the compiler of the Stoical philosophy of " the Phrygian 

 Slave," the historian of the son of Phihp,^ the hydrographer 

 of the Euxine, a military tactician, a warrior-prefect, and a 



Jueement sur ^* "^^'^ vanity which La Mothe Le Vayer discovers, so glaring in his history, and 



les Anciens more particularly in what he says of liimself in the 12th chapter of the first book of the 



, . f^"* „ ^" Anabasis of Alexander, before quoted, and from which Gronovius and Raphelius 



toriens, «xc. p. . 



84. satisfactorily exculpate him, I confess I do not see. The pride of the historian is 



not beyond the dignity of his subject. 



