costume at this his first official appearance before the army, when the scales seemed to tremble between life and death. Taking up the protest of Kleanor against the treachery of the Persians, he insisted that any attempt to enter into convention or trust with such liars would be utter ruin; but that if energetic resolution were taken to deal with them only at the point of the sword, and punish their misdeeds, there was good hope of the favour of the gods and of ultimate preservation. As he pronounced this last word one of the soldiers near him happened to sneeze; immediately the whole army around shouted with one accord the accustomed invocation to Zeus the Preserver; and Xenophon, taking up the accident, continued: Since, gentlemen, this omen from Zeus the Preserver has appeared at the instant when we were talking about preservation, let us here vow to offer the preserving sacrifice to that god, and at the same time to sacrifice to the remaining gods as well as we can, in the first friendly country which we may reach. Let every man who agrees with me hold up his hand.' All held up their hands; all then joined in the vow, and shouted the pan.

This accident, so dexterously turned to profit by the thetorical skill of Xenophon, was eminently beneficial in raising the army out of the depression which weighed them down, and in disposing them to listen to his animating appeal. Repeating his assurances that the gods were on their side and hostile to their perjured enemy, he recalled to their memory the great invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxes-how the vast hosts of Persia had been disgracefully repelled. The army had shown themselves on the field of Kunaxa worthy of such forefathers; and they would, for the future, be yet bolder, knowing by that battle of what stuff the Persians were made. As for Ariæus and his troops, alike traitors and cowards, their desertion was rather a gain than a loss. The enemy were superior in horsemen ; but men on horseback were, after all, only men, half occupied in the fear of losing their seats, incapable of prevailing against infantry firm on the ground, and only better able to run away. Now that the satrap refused to furnish them with provisions to buy, they on their side were released from their covenant, and would take provisions without buying. Then as to the rivers: those were indeed difficult to be crossed in the middle of their course; but the army would march up to their sources, and could then pass them without wetting the knee. Or, indeed, the Greeks might renounce the idea of retreat, and establish themselves permanently in the king's own country, defying all his force, like the Mysians and Pisidians. 'If,' said Xenophon, 'we plant ourselves here at our ease in a rich country, with these tall, stately, and beautiful Median and Persian women for our companions, we shall be only too ready, like the Lotophagi, to forget our way home. We ought first to go back to Greece, and tell our countrymen that if they remain poor it is their own fault, when there are rich settlements in this country awaiting all who choose to come, and who have courage to seize them. Let us burn our baggage-wagons and tents, and carry with us nothing but what is of the strictest necessity. Above all things, let us maintain order, discipline, and obedience to the commanders, upon which our entire hope of safety depends. Let every man promise to lend his hand to the commanders in punishing any disobedient individuals; and let us thus show the enemy that we have

ten thousand persons like Klearchus, instead of that one whom they have so perfidiously seized. Now is the time for action. If any man, however obscure, has anything better to suggest, let him come forward and state it; for we have all but one object-the common safety.' It appears that no one else desired to say a word, and that the speech of Xenophon gave unqualified satisfaction; for when Cheirisophus put the question, that the meeting should sanction his recommendations, and finally elect the new generals proposed, every man held up his hand. Xenophon then moved that the army should break up immediately and march to some well-stored villages, rather more than two miles distant; that the march should be in a hollow oblong, with the baggage in the centre; that Cheirisophus, as a Lacedæmonian, should lead the van; while Kleanor and the other senior officers would command on each flank; and himself with Timasion, as the two youngest of the generals, would lead the rear-guard.

Dion.

Apart from wealth and high position, the personal character of Dion was in itself marked and prominent. He was of an energetic temper, great bravery, and very considerable mental capacities. Though his nature was haughty and disdainful towards individuals, yet as to political communion his ambition was by no means purely self-seeking and egotistic, like that of the elder Dionysius. Animated with vehement love of power, he was at the same time penetrated with that sense of regulated polity and submission of individual will to fixed laws which floated in the atmosphere of Grecian talk and literature, and stood so high in Grecian morality. He was, moreover, capable of acting with enthusiasm, and braving every hazard in prosecution of his own convictions.

He

Born about the year 408 B. C., Dion was twenty-one years of age in 387 B.C., when the elder Dionysius, having dismantled Rhegium and subdued Kroton, attained the maximum of his dominion, as master of the Sicilian and Italian Greeks. Standing high in the favour of his brother-in-law Dionysius, Dion doubtless took part in the wars whereby this large dominion had been acquired, as well as in the life of indulgence and luxury which prevailed generally among wealthy Greeks in Sicily and Italy, and which to the Athenian Plato appeared alike surprising and repulsive. That great philosopher visited Italy and Sicily about 387 B.C. was in acquaintance and fellowship with the school of philosophers called Pythagoreans; the remnant of the Pythagorean brotherhood, who had once exercised so powerful a political influence over the cities of those regions, and who still enjoyed considerable reputation, even after complete political downfall, through indi vidual ability and rank of the members, combined with habits of recluse study, mysticism, and attachment among themselves. With these Pythagoreans Dion also, a young man of open mind and ardent aspirations, was naturally thrown into communication by the proceedings of the elder Dionysius in Italy. Through them he came into intercourse with Plato, whose conversation made an epoch in his life.

The mystic turn of imagination, the sententious brevity, and the mathematical researches of the Pythagoreans produced doubtless an imposing effect upon Dion; just as Lysis, a member of that brotherhood, had acquired

the attachment and influenced the sentiments of Epaminondas at Thebes. But Plato's power of working upon the minds of young men was far more impressive and irresistible. He possessed a large range of practical experience, a mastery of political and social topics, and a charm of eloquence to which the Pythagoreans were strangers. The stirring effects of the Sokratic talk, as well as of the democratical atmosphere in which Plato had been brought up, had developed all the communicative aptitude of his mind; and great as that aptitude appears in his remaining dialogues, there is ground for believing that it was far greater in his conversation; greater perhaps in 387 B.C., when he was still mainly the Sokratic Plato, than it became in later days after he had imbibed to a certain extent the mysticism of the Pythagoreans. Brought up as Dion had been at the court of Dionysius, accustomed to see around him only slavish deference and luxurious enjoyment, unused to open speech or large philosophical discussion, he found in Plato a new man exhibited, and a new world opened before him. . . .

As the stimulus from the teacher was here put forth with consummate efficacy, so the predisposition of the learner enabled it to take full effect. Dion became an altered man both in public sentiment and in individual behaviour. He recollected that, twenty years before, his country, Syracuse, had been as free as Athens. He learned to abhor the iniquity of the despotism by which her liberty had been overthrown, and by which subsequently the liberties of so many other Greeks in Italy and Sicily had been trodden down also. He was made to remark that Sicily had been half barbarised through the foreign mercenaries imported as the despots' instruments. He conceived the sublime idea or dream of rectifying all this accumulation of wrong and suffering. It was his first wish to cleanse Syracuse from the blot of slavery, and to clothe her anew in the brightness and dignity of freedom, yet not with the view of restoring the popular government as it had stood prior to the usurpation, but of establishing an improved constitutional polity, originated by himself, with laws which should not only secure individual rights, but also educate and moralise the citizens. The function which he imagined to himself, and which the conversation of Plato suggested, was not that of a despot like Dionysius, but that of a despotic legislator like Lykurgus, taking advantage of a momentary omnipotence, conferred upon him by grateful citizens in a state of public confusion, to originate a good system, which, when once put in motion, would keep itself alive by fashioning the minds of the citizens to its own intrinsic excellence.

Grote's minor works were published by Professor Bain in 1873, and Fragments on Ethical Subjects in 1876.-Mrs Grote (17921878) wrote a Memoir of Ary Scheffer (1860), a volume of Collected Papers in Prose and Verse (1862), books on the Philosophical Radicals of 1832 (especially Molesworth) and on the political events of 1831-32, and The Personal Life of George Grote (1873).

Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873), born at Dent vicarage in north-west Yorkshire, after being a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, became Woodwardian Professor of Geology (1818), canon of Norwich (1834), and vice-master of Trinity (1847). His best work was on British Paleozoic Fossils (1854); he trenchantly attacked The Vestiges of Creation and Darwin's Origin of Species. See his Life and Letters by Clark and Hughes (2 vols. 1890).

Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby (1795-1842), who in many ways influenced the thought and life of England, holds his place in literature mainly in virtue of his History of Rome. A native of East Cowes in the Isle of Wight, where his father was collector of customs, he was educated at Winchester, and afterwards at Oxford, being elected a scholar of Corpus in 1811 and a Fellow of Oriel in 1815. He remained at Oxford four more years, teaching pupils; and in his twenty-fifth year he settled at Laleham near Staines in Middlesex, where he took pupils, married, and spent nine years of happiness and study. He took priest's orders in 1828, and in the same year he was appointed to the headmastership of Rugby School. He longed to 'try whether our public school system has not in it some noble elements which may produce fruit even to life eternal,' and his exertions not only raised Rugby School to exceptional eminence and success, but introduced an inestimable change and improvement into all the public schools in England. He trusted much to the 'sixth form,' or elder boys, who exercised a recognised authority over the junior pupils, and these he inspired with love, reverence, and confidence. His interest in his pupils was that of a parent, and it was unceasing. On Sunday he preached to them; 'he was still the instructor and the schoolmaster, only teaching and educating with increased solemnity and energy.' His firmness, his sympathy, his fine manly character and devotion to duty, in time bound all good hearts to him. Out-of-doors Arnold had also his battles to fight. He was a Liberal in politics, and a keen Church reformer. To the High Church party he was strenuously opposed; the Church, he said, meant not the priesthood, but the body of believers. Nothing could save the Church but a union with the Dissenters; and the civil power was more able than the clergy not only to govern but to fix the doctrines of the Church. These Erastian views, propounded with his usual zeal and earnestness, offended and alarmed many of Arnold's own friends. His liberalism shocked the mass of the devout, and his reverent religious spirit puzzled those more 'advanced' than he was. In 1841 he was nominated Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. His inaugural lecture was attended by a vast concourse of students and friends, for the popular tide had now turned in his favour, and his apparently robust health promised a long succession of professorial triumphs, as well as of general usefulness. He had purchased Fox How, in one of the most beautiful parts of the Lake country, spending all his spare time there; and he was preparing to return thither in the summer of 1842, when one night he had an attack of angina pectoris, and died next morning (12th June).

Arnold's works give but a faint idea of what he accomplished-he was emphatically a man of action; but his writings are characteristic of the man-earnest, clear in conception and style, and

independent in thought. His History of Rome, which he intended to carry down to the fall of the Western Empire, was completed only to the end of the Second Punic War (3 vols. 1838-42); his Oxford Lectures on Modern History, and a history of the later Roman commonwealth (reprinted from the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana), were published after his death; and he edited Thucydides. Six volumes of his Sermons, chiefly delivered to the Rugby boys, were also printed, with a volume of tracts on social and political topics. In the History of Rome -the first two volumes especially-he very closely follows Niebuhr, expanding the theory that the commonly received history of the early centuries of Rome was in great part fabulous, as being founded on popular songs or lays chanted by minstrels or recited by imaginative chroniclers at Roman banquets. His strong moral feeling and hatred of tyranny in all its shapes occasionally break forth, and he gave animation to his narrative by contrasting ancient with modern events, thereby giving later historians an example apt to prove dangerous to the historic spirit.

Scipio.

A mind like Scipio's, working its way under the peculiar influences of his time and country, cannot but move irregularly-it cannot but be full of contradictions. Two hundred years later the mind of the dictator, Cæsar, acquiesced contentedly in epicureanism; he retained no more of enthusiasm than was inseparable from the intensity of his intellectual power and the fervour of his courage, even amidst his utter moral degrada tion. But Scipio could not be like Cæsar. His mind rose above the state of things around him; his spirit was solitary and kingly; he was cramped by living among those as his equals whom he felt fitted to guide as from some higher sphere; and he retired at last to Liternum, to breathe freely, to enjoy the simplicity of his childhood, since he could not fulfil his natural calling to be a hero-king. So far he stood apart from his countrymen-admired, reverenced, but not loved. But he could not shake off all the influences of his time: the virtue, public and private, which still existed at Rome; the reverence paid by the wisest and best men to the religion of their fathers, were elements too congenial to his nature not to retain their hold on it: they cherished that nobleness of soul in him, and that faith in the invisible and divine, which two centuries of growing unbelief rendered almost impossible in the days of Cæsar. Yet how strange must the conflict be when faith is combined with the highest intellectual power, and its appointed object is no better than paganism ! Longing to believe, yet repelled by palpable falsehood -crossed inevitably with snatches of unbelief, in which hypocrisy is ever close at the door-it breaks out desperately, as it may seem, into the region of dreams and visions, and mysterious communings with the invisible, as if longing to find that food in its own creations which no outward objective truth offers to it. The proportions of belief and unbelief in the human mind in such cases no human judgment can determine-they are the wonders of history; characters inevitably misrepresented by the vulgar, and viewed even by those who, in some sense, have the key to them as a mystery not fully to be

comprehended, and still less explained to others. The genius which conceived the incomprehensible character of Hamlet would alone be able to describe with intuitive truth the character of Scipio or of Cromwell. With all his greatness there was a waywardness in him which seems often to accompany genius; a self-idolatry, natural enough when there is so keen a consciousness of power and of lofty designs; a self-dependence, which feels even the most sacred external relations to be unessential to its own perfection. Such is the Achilles of Homer, the highest conception of the individual hero relying on himself, and sufficient to himself. But the same poet who conceived the character of Achilles has also drawn that of Hector; of the truly noble, because unselfish, hero, who subdues his genius to make it minister to the good of others; who lives for his relations, his friends, and his country. And as Scipio lived in himself and for himself like Achilles, so the virtue of Hector was worthily represented in the life of his great rival Hannibal, who, from his childhood to his latest hour, in war and in peace, through glory and through obloquy, amid victories and amid disappointments, ever remembered to what purpose his father had devoted him, and withdrew no thought or desire or deed from their pledged service to his country.

Hannibal.

As

If Hannibal's genius may be likened to the Homeric god, who, in his hatred of the Trojans, rises from the deep to rally the fainting Greeks, and to lead them against the enemy; so the calm courage with which Hector met his more than human adversary in his country's cause is no unworthy image of the unyielding magnanimity displayed by the aristocracy of Rome. Hannibal utterly eclipses Carthage, so, on the contrary, Fabius, Marcellus, Claudius Nero, even Scipio himself, are as nothing when compared to the spirit and wisdom and power of Rome. The senate, which voted its thanks to its political enemy, Varro, after his disastrous defeat, because he had not despaired of the commonwealth, and which disdained either to solicit, or to reprove, or to threaten, or in any way to notice the twelve colonies which had refused their accustomed supplies of men for the army, is far more to be honoured than the conqueror of Zama. This we should the more carefully bear in mind, because our tendency is to admire individual greatness far more than national; and as no single Roman will bear comparison with Hannibal, we are apt to murmur at the event of the contest, and to think that the victory was awarded to the least worthy of the combatants. On the contrary, never was the wisdom of God's providence more manifest than in the issue of the struggle between Rome and Carthage. It was clearly for the good of mankind that Hannibal should be conquered his triumph would have stopped the progress of the world. For great men can only act permanently by forming great nations; and no one man, even though it were Hannibal himself, can in one generation effect such a work. But where the nation has been merely enkindled for a while by a great man's spirit, the light passes away with him who communicated it; and the nation when he is gone is like a dead body to which magic power had for a moment given an unnatural life; when the charm has ceased the body is cold and stiff as before. He who grieves over the battle of Zama should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty

years later, when Hannibal must, in the course of nature, have been dead, and consider how the isolated Phoenician city of Carthage was fitted to receive and to consolidate the civilisation of Greece, or by its laws and institutions to bind together barbarians of every race and language into an organised empire, and prepare them for becoming, when that empire was dissolved, the free members of the commonwealth of Christian Europe.

The Siege of Genoa.

In the autumn of 1799 the Austrians had driven the French out of Lombardy and Piedmont; their last victory of Fossano or Genola had won the fortress of Coni or Cuneo, close under the Alps, and at the very extremity of the plain of the Po; the French clung to Italy only by their hold of the Riviera of Genoa, the narrow strip of coast between the Apennines and the sea, which extends from the frontiers of France almost to the mouth of the Arno. Hither the remains of the French force were collected, commanded by General Massena, and the point of chief importance to his defence was the city of Genoa. Napoleon had just returned from Egypt, and was become First Consul; but he could not be expected to take the field till the following spring, and till then Massena was hopeless of relief from without-everything was to depend on his own pertinacity. The strength of his army made it impossible to force it in such a position as Genoa; but its very numbers, added to the population of a great city, held out to the enemy a hope of reducing it by famine; and as Genoa derives most of its supplies by sea, Lord Keith, the British naval commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, lent the assistance of his naval force to the Austrians, and by the vigilance of his cruisers, the whole coasting-trade right and left along the Riviera was effectually cut off. It is not at once that the inhabitants of a great city, accustomed to the daily sight of well-stored shops and an abundant market, begin to realise the idea of scarcity; or that the wealthy classes of society, who have never known any other state than one of abundance and luxury, begin seriously to conceive of famine. But the shops were emptied, and the storehouses began to be drawn upon, and no fresh supply or hope of supply appeared. Winter passed away, and spring returned, so early and so beautiful on that gardenlike coast, sheltered as it is from the north winds by its belt of mountains, and open to the full range of the southern sun. Spring returned, and clothed the hillsides with its fresh verdure. But that verdure was no longer the mere delight of the careless eye of luxury, refreshing the citizens with its liveliness and softness when they rode or walked up thither from the city to enjoy the surpassing beauty of the prospect. The green hillsides were now visited for a very different object: ladies of the highest rank might be seen cutting up every plant which it was possible to turn to food, and bearing home the common weeds of our roadsides as a most precious treasure. The French general pitied the distress of the people, but the lives and strength of his garrison seemed to him more important than the lives of the Genoese; and such provisions as remained were re served, in the first place, for the French army. Scarcity became utter want, and want became famine. In the most gorgeous palaces of that gorgeous city, no less than in the humblest tenements of its humblest poor, death was busy; not the momentary death of battle

or massacre, nor the speedy death of pestilence, but the lingering death of famine. Infants died before their parents' eyes; husbands and wives lay down to expire together. A man whom I saw at Genoa in 1825 told me that his father and two of his brothers had been starved to death in this fatal siege. So it went on till, in the month of June, when Napoleon had already descended from the Alps into the plains of Lombardy, the misery became unendurable, and Massena surrendered. But before he did so, twenty thousand innocent persons, old and young, women and children, had died by the most horrible of deaths which humanity can endure!

An Edinburgh reviewer said all Arnold's works were proofs of his ability and goodness, yet the story of his life is worth them all;' and that story has been told to admirable purpose by Dean Stanley in his Life of Arnold (1845; 12th ed., with additions, 1881; new ed. 1900). See also Findlay's Arnold of Rugby (1897); Sir Joshina Fitch on Thomas and Matthew Arnold, and their Influence on English Education (1897); and the Rugby idyll, Tom Brown's Schooldays, by Thomas Hughes. Charles H. Pearson has somewhat trenchantly criticised the 'Arnold tradition,' and insisted on certain defects in the Rugby system; see his Life by Stebbing (1900). Matthew Arnold, the poet and critic, was Dr Arnold's eldest son; his second, Thomas, father of Mrs Humphry Ward, wrote on historical subjects and literature, and as a good Catholic helped to edit a Catholic Dictionary.

two

Connop Thirlwall (1797-1875), born at Stepney, from the Charterhouse passed in 1814 to Trinity College, Cambridge, and after a distinguished course was elected a Fellow. He was called to the Bar in 1825, but in 1827 took orders, having years before translated Schleiermacher's Essay on St Luke, then regarded as alarmingly rationalistic.' His return to Cambridge was marked by the translation, with his friend Julius Hare, of Niebuhr's History of Rome (1828–32); and their Philological Museum (1831-33) contained some remarkable papers, among them Thirlwall's 'On the Irony of Sophocles.' He petitioned and wrote (1834) in favour of the admission of Dissenters to degrees. The Master of Trinity, Dr Wordsworth, called on him to resign his assistant-tutorship, which he did under protest. Almost immediately he was presented by Brougham to the Yorkshire living of Kirby-Underdale. Here he wrote for Lardner's Cyclopædia his History of Greece (1835-47; improved ed. 1847-52). Scholarly, learned, and accurate, as well as dignified in style, the work marks an enormous advance on Mitford and ranks amongst English classics; but it was in large measure superseded for the general public by Grote's (published in 1846-56). In 1840 Lord Melbourne raised Thirlwall to the see of St David's. For thirty-four years-till his resignation-he laboured with the utmost diligence in his diocese, building churches, parsonages, and schools, and augmenting poor livings. His eleven Charges remain an enduring monument of breadth of view the first a catholic apology for the Tractarians. He joined in censuring Essays and Reviews, but was one of the four bishops who refused to inhibit Colenso, and he was as a Latitudinarian regarded with suspicious alarm, alike by High-Churchmen and Evangelicals. He supported

the Maynooth grant, the admission of Jews to Parliament, and alone amongst the bishops the disestablishment of the Irish Church. Perowne edited his Remains, Literary and Theological (1877-78); Perowne and Stokes his Letters, Literary and Theological (1881); and Dean Stanley the beautiful series to a young ladythe Letters to a Friend (1881).

Aristophanes against Socrates.

Euripides, however, occupies only a subordinate place among the disciples and supporters of the sophistical school, whom Aristophanes attacked. The person whom he selected as its representative, and on whom he endeavoured to throw the whole weight of the charges which he brought against it, was Socrates. In the Clouds, a comedy exhibited in 423, a year after the Knights had been received with so much applause, Socrates was brought on the stage under his own name, as the arch-sophist, the master of the freethinking school. The story is of a young spendthrift, who has involved his father in debt by his passion for horses, and having been placed under the care of Socrates, is enabled by his instructions to defraud his creditors, but also learns to regard filial obedience and respect, and piety to the gods, as groundless and antiquated prejudices; and it seems hardly possible to doubt that under this character the poet meant to represent Alcibiades, whom it perfectly suits in its general outline, and who may have been suggested to the thoughts of the spectators in many ways not now perceived by the reader. It seems at first sight as if, in this work, Aristophanes must stand convicted either of the foulest motives or of a gross mistake. For the character of Socrates was in most points directly opposed to the principles and practice which he attributes here and elsewhere to the sophists and their followers. Socrates was the son of a sculptor of little reputation, and himself for some time practised the art with moderate success. But he abandoned it that he might give himself up to philosophy, though his income was so scanty that it scarcely provided him with the means of subsistence. In his youth he had made himself master of every kind of knowledge then attainable at Athens which his narrow fortune permitted him to acquire, and he purchased the lessons of several of the learned men who came to sojourn there at a price which he was never well able to spare. Yet when his own talents had attracted a crowd of admirers, and among them some of the wealthiest youths, he not only demanded no reward for his instructions, but rejected all the offers which they made to relieve his poverty. We have already seen some specimens of the manner in which he discharged the duties of a soldier and a citizen: how he braved the fury of the multitude and the resentment of the tyrants in the cause of justice. It is not my intention here to speak of the place which he holds in the history of Greek philosophy. But we have already had occasion to mention his contests with the sophists, and we have ample evidence that his discourses as well as his life were uniformly devoted to the furtherance of piety and virtue. Yet in the Clouds this excellent person appears in the most odious as well as ridiculous aspect; and the play ends with the preparations made by the father of the misguided youth to consume him

and his school. The wrong done to him appears the more flagrant on account of its fatal consequences. The wish which the poet intimates at the close of his play, with an earnestness which almost oversteps the limits of comedy, was fulfilled, though not till above twenty years later, after the restoration of the democracy (B.C. 399), when Socrates was prosecuted and put to death on a charge which expressed the substance of the imputations cast on him in the Clouds; and Aristophanes was believed by their contemporaries to have contributed mainly to this result.

There are two points with regard to the conduct of Aristophanes which appear to have been placed by recent investigations beyond doubt. It may be considered as certain that he was not animated by any personal malevolence toward Socrates, but only attacked him as an enemy and corrupter of religion and morals; but, on the other hand, it is equally well established that he did not merely borrow the name of Socrates for the representative of the sophistical school, but designed to point the attention and to excite the feelings of his audience against the real individual. The only question which seems to be still open to controversy on this subject concerns the degree in which Aristophanes was acquainted with the real character and aims of Socrates, as they are known to us from the uniform testimony of his intimate friends and disciples. We find it difficult to adopt the opinion of some modern writers, who contend that Aristophanes, notwithstanding a perfect knowledge of the difference between Socrates and the sophists, might still have looked upon him as standing so completely on the same ground with them that one description was applicable to them and him. It is true, as we have already observed, that the poet would willingly have suppressed all reflection and inquiry on many of the subjects which were discussed both by the sophists and by Socrates, as a presumptuous encroachment on the province of authority. But it seems incredible that if he had known all that makes Socrates so admirable and amiable in our eyes, he would have assailed him with such vehement bitterness, and that he should never have qualified his satire by a single word indicative of the respect which he must then have felt to be due at least to his character and his intentions.

But if we suppose what is in itself much more consistent with the opinions and pursuits of the comic poet, that he observed the philosopher attentively indeed, but from a distance which permitted no more than a superficial acquaintance, we are then at no loss to understand how he might have confounded him with a class of men with which he had so little in common, and why he singled him out to represent them. He probably first formed his judgment of Socrates by the society in which he usually saw him. He may have known that his early studies had been directed by Archelaus, the disciple of Anaxagoras; that he had both himself received the instruction of the most eminent sophists, and had induced others to become their hearers; that Euripides, who had introduced the sophistical spirit into the drama, and Alcibiades, who illustrated it most completely in his life, were in the number of his most intimate friends. Socrates never willingly stirred beyond the walls of the city, and lived almost wholly in public places, which he seldom entered without forming a circle round him and opening some discussion connected with the objects of his philosophical researches; he readily