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PHÆDO.
79

neither could I feel the pleasure which I usually felt in philosophical discourse. I was pleased, and I was also pained, because I knew that he was soon to die; and this strange mixture of feeling was shared by us all: we were laughing and weeping by turns, especially the excitable Apollodorus."

Cicero (who was by no means tender-hearted) declared that he could never read the "Phædo" without tears; and we all know the story of the fair pupil of Ascham, who, while the horns were sounding and dogs in full cry, sat in the lonely oriel with eyes riveted to that immortal page which tells how meekly and bravely the first martyr of intellectual liberty took the cup from his weeping jailer."[1]

  1. Macaulay's Essay on Lord Bacon.