as they are, ever have ventured to accuse of impiety, and to condemn to death for it, the very man whom an infallible god had so signalized? If fifty ages and fifty nations had taken up this fable, I would reduce it to dust under my feet.

Plato. I dare not listen to such discourse.

Diogenes. Thou shalt; were it only for variety.

Plato. I limited my discourse to the defense of Socrates; with such as Anaxagoras and Democritus we have nothing in common. But, censuring Socrates as you do, you must surely want your usual modesty, O citizen of Sinopè !

Diogenes. Praise me then; since, wanting it, I never took any one's away.

Plato. Little should I now wonder to hear you call yourself as wise as he was.

Diogenes. Could he keep at home as I do? Could he abstain from questioning and quibbling, to win the applause of boys and pedants? Am I not contented in my house here, over whose roof, standing on level ground, I cast my shadow? I pretend not to know the secrets of the lower regions or the upper: I let the gods sit quiet, and they do the same by me. Hearing that there are three Furies, I have taken the word of the wise for it, and never have carried a link down below in search of a fourth. He found her up here. I neither envy him his discovery, nor wonder at the tranquillity of his death. Wisdom is tripartite saying, doing, avoiding.

Mine, I must acknowledge, has been insufficient in the latter quality; but I hope to correct my fault in future.

Diogenes. On this particular I am not incredulous. Thou owest me too much ever to let me smell thy beard again. From this humble and frugal house of mine thou shalt carry home whole truths, and none mutilated; intelligible truths, and none ambiguous. Probably I know not a quarter of thy writings; but, in the number I do know, I find more incongruous scraps of philosophy and religion, sweet, sour, and savory, thrown into one stewing-pan, and simmering and bubbling, than my stomach can digest or my fingers separate.

Plato. Too encomiastic! If I may judge by the fumes of the garlic, the stomach is surely strong; and, if another sense is equally faithful, the fingers are armed at all points.

Diogenes. Well spoken and truly. I have improved thee already; go thy way, and carry thy whole robe safe back.

Diogenes Laertius, biographer of the Cynic, is among the most inelegant and injudicious writers of antiquity; yet his book is highly valuable for the anecdotes it preserves. No philosopher or other man more abounded in shrewd wit than the philosopher of Sinopè, whose opinions have been somewhat misunderstood, and whose memory hath suffered much injustice. One Diocles, and afterward Eubulides, mention him (it appears) as having been expelled from Sinopè for counterfeiting money; and his biographer tells us that he has recorded it of himself. His words led astray these authors. He says that he MARKED false money; for an equivoke was ever the darling of Diogenes, and, by the marking of false money, he means only that he exposed the fallacies of pretenders to virtue and philosophy. Had he been exiled for the crime of forgery, Alexander of Macedon, we may well suppose, would not have visited him, would not have desired him to ask any favor he chose, would not have declared that, if he were not Alexander, he would fain have been Diogenes. He did not visit him from an idle curiosity, for he had seen him before in his father's camp on his first invasion of Greece, where he was apprehended as a spy; and, being brought before the king, exclaimed, "I am indeed a spy: a spy of thy temerity and cupidity, who hazardest on the cast of a die thy throne and life." This is related by Plutarch in his "Ethics." Some men may think forgery no very heinous crime, but all must think it an act of dishonesty; and kings (whose moral scale is nowhere an exact one) would be likely to hold it in greater reprobation than any thing but treason and insurrection. Had the accusation been true, or credited, or made at the time, the Athenians would not have tolerated so long his residence among them, severe as he was on their manners, and peculiarly contemptuous and contumelious toward the orators and philosophers; Plato for instance, and afterward Demosthenes. Here however we may animadvert on the inaccuracy of attributing to him the reply, when somebody asked him what he thought of Socrates as having seen him, "THAT HE THOUGHT HIM A MADMAN." Diogenes was but twelve years old at the death of Socrates, and did not leave Sinopè till long after. The answer, we may conceive, originated from the description that Plato in many of his dialogues had given of his master. Among the faults of Plato he ridiculed his affectation of new words unnecessary and inelegant; for instance, his coinage of τрañεCórηs and кvatóτns, which Plato defended very frigidly, telling him that, although he had eyes to see a cup and a table, he had not understanding for CUPPEITY and TABLEITY; and it indeed must be an uncommon one! Plato himself, the most invidious of the Greek writers, says

that he was another Socrates, but a mad one; meaning (no doubt) that he was a Socrates when he spoke generally, a mad one when he spoke of HIM. Among his hearers was Phocion: a fact which alone would set aside the tale of his adversaries, a thousand times repeated by their readers, about his public indulgence in certain immoralities which no magistrature would tolerate.

Late in life he was taken by pirates, and sold to Xeniades the Corinthian, whose children he educated, and who declared that a good genius had entered his house in Diogenes. Here he died. A contest arose, to whom among his intimates and disciples should be allowed the distinction of supplying the expenses of his funeral; nor Iwas it settled till the fathers of his auditors and the leaders of the people met together, and agreed to bury him at the public charge at the gate of the Isthmus: the most remarkable spot in Greece, by the assemblage of whose bravest inhabitants it was made glorious, and sacred by the games in honor of her gods.

DEMOSTHENES AND EUBULIDES*

EUBULIDES. You have always convinced me, O

Demosthenes, while you were speaking; but I had afterward need to be convinced again; and I acknowledge that I do not yet believe in the necessity, or indeed in the utility, of a war with Philip.

Demosthenes. He is too powerful.

Eubulides. This is my principal reason for recommending that we should abstain from hostilities. When you have said that he is too powerful, you have admitted that we are too weak; we are still bleeding from the Spartan.

Demosthenes. Whatever I could offer in reply, O Eubulides, I have already spoken in public, and I would rather not enlarge at present on it. Come, tell me freely what you think of my speech.

Eubulides. In your language, O Demosthenes, there is, I think, a resemblance to the Kephisos, whose waters, as you must have observed, are in most seasons pure and limpid and equable in their course, yet abounding in depths of which, when we discern the bottom, we wonder that we discern it so clearly; the same river at every storm swells

*A philosopher of Miletus, and a dramatic poet. Demosthenes is said to have been his scholar.

into a torrent, without ford or boundary, and is the stronger and the more impetuous from resistance.

Demosthenes. Language is part of a man's character.
Eubulides. It often is artificial.

Demosthenes. Often both are. I speak not of such language as that of Gorgias and Isocrates and other rhetoricians, but of that which belongs to eloquence; of that which enters the heart however closed against it, of that which pierces like the sword of Perseus, of that which carries us aloft and easily as Medea her children, and holds the world below in the same suspense.

Eubulides. When I had repeated in the morning to Cynobalanos part of a conversation I held with you the evening before, word for word,-my memory being very exact as you know, and especially in retaining your phrases, he looked at me with a smile on his countenance, and said, "Pardon me, O Eubulides, but this surely is not the language of Demosthenes." In reality, you had then, as you often do when we are alone together, given way to your genius, and had hazarded an exuberance of thought, imagination, and expression, which delighted and transported me. For there was nothing idle, nothing incorrect, but much both solid and ornamental; as those vases and tripods are which the wealthy and powerful offer to the gods.

Demosthenes. Cynobalanos is a sensible man, and conversant in style; but Cynobalanos never has remarked that I do not wear among my friends at table the same short dress I put on for the bema. A more sweeping train would be trodden down, and the wearer not listened to, but laughed at. Look into the field before you. See those anemones, white, pink, and purple, fluttering in the breeze; and those other flowers, whatever they are, with close-knotted spiral blossoms, in the form of a thyrsus. Some of both species rise above the young barley, and are very pretty; but the farmer will root them out as a blemish to his cultivation, and unprofitable in sustaining his family. In such a manner must we treat the undergrowth of our thoughts, pleasing as they may be at their first appearance in the spring of life. One fellow thinks himself like Demosthenes, because he employs the same movement of the arms and body; another,

for no better reason than because he is vituperative, acrid, and insolent, and, before he was hissed and hooted from the Agora, had excited the populace by the vehemence of his harangues. But you, who know the face and features of Demosthenes, his joints and muscles and whole conformation, know that Nature hath separated this imitative animal most widely from him.

Eubulides. Mischievous as an ape, noisy as a lap dog, and restless as a squirrel, he runs along to the extremity of every twig, leaps over from party to party, and, shaken off from all, creeps under the throne at Pella.

Demosthenes. Philip is the fittest ruler for his own people, but he is better for any one else to dine with than to act or think with. His conversation is far above the kingly it is that of an urbane companion, of a scholar, I was going to say of a philosopher; I will say more, of a sound unwrangling reasoner, of a plain, intelligent, and intelligible man. But those qualities, not being glaring, do not attract to him the insects from without. Even the wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face of the same color. Royalty is fed incessantly by the fuel of slavish desires, blown by fulsome breath and fanned by cringing follies. It melts mankind into one inert mass, carrying off and confounding all beneath it; like a torrent of Etnean lava, bright amid the darkness, and dark again amid the light.

Eubulides. O for Cynobalanos! how would he stare and lift up his shoulders at this torrent!

Demosthenes. He never can have seen me but in the Agora; and I do not carry a full purse into the crowd. Thither I go with a tight girdle round my body; in the country I walk and wander about discinct. How I became what I am, you know as well as I do. I was to form a manner, with great models on one side of me, and Nature on the other. Had I imitated Plato (the writer then most admired) I must have fallen short of his amplitude; and his sentences are seldom such as could be admitted into a popular harangue. Xenophon is elegant, but unimpassioned, and not entirely free, I think, from affectation. Herodotus is exempt from it: what simplicity! what