forty years of his life. A story is indeed extant to the effect that Socrates heard the "Lysis" read to him, and exclaimed—"Good heavens! what a heap of falsehoods this young man tells about me!" but Socrates had in all probability died some years before the "Lysis" was published. The speakers in these Dialogues are no more historical than the characters in Shakspeare's plays, and Plato was (perhaps purposely) careless of dates and names. But the personages thus introduced serve their purpose. They give a life and a reality to the scenes and conversations which is wanting in Berkeley's Dialogues, and in all modern imitations, and their tempers and peculiarities are touched by a master-hand. But there is one character which Plato never paints, and that is—his own. Except in two casual allusions, he never directly or indirectly introduces himself; and no one can argue, from the internal evidence of his writings, as to what he was or was not. Like Shakspeare, he deserves Coleridge's epithet of "myriad-minded," for he appears to us in all shapes and characters. He was "sceptic, dogmatist, religious mystic and inquisitor, mathematical philosopher, artist, poet—all in one, or at least all in succession, during the fifty years of his philosophical life."[1]
There is one pervading feature of similarity in all the Dialogues, and that is, the style.[2] If Jove had spoken Greek (it was said of old), he would have
- ↑ Grote's Plato, i. 214.
- ↑ Sir Arthur Helps, himself a writer of purest English, has given us in 'Realmah' his ideas of what a perfect style should be. Every word in his description would closely apply to Plato,
