PLATO.

PLATO is one of the most massive and magnificent, but at

the same time, to us moderns at least, in some respects one of the most perplexing and unsatisfactory of writers. This fault, however, is not one of poverty and weakness, but proceeds, in a great measure, from the very vastness, comprehensiveness, and many-sided variety of his intellect. As on some mighty broad-based monarch of mountains, like our Scottish Benmuich-dhui, it is more easy to lose one's way, than on a compact, well-rounded, and distinctly marked hill, of which the boundary is anywhere easily measured by common optics; and as the approach to this huge-heaved summit is made through long stretches of bog, forest, sheer-rising cliff, and curiously-winding glen-so the study of Plato is not a work to be lightly undertaken by every man who can drive a gig creditably on good roads through the low country of Dr. Paley and Dr. Reid. The same slipperiness of approach, in fact, and the same difficulty of mastering, is observable in the case of Goethe, and other writers of various and rich fertility of genius. We do not mean, of course, that a great genius is always hard to be laid hold of-Walter Scott were a very notable example to the contrary-but what we say is, that there is a particular order of minds of the first class, that comprehend so much, and unite, under one gigantic intellectual supremacy, such contrary and apparently incompatible elements, that it is very difficult for readers, accustomed to the simple. structure of inferior minds, to work their way to the central point from which the vast whole becomes comprehensible. Such a central point unquestionably there is in every strong and original mind; exactly as in the case of the lofty mountain, the summit, and the summit only, is the point from

which the whole rocky mass itself, and the circumjacent plains, may be intelligibly surveyed. Now, it is no doubt possible to be transported to the top of a high mountain in a balloon or other airy carriage, and thus, at a very small expense of time and labour, master the general outlines of such an intelligible survey; but for a really clear and thorough understanding of a mighty mountain, the detailed way of mounting gradually, through the winding approach of the long glens, is indispensable. The squashy bogs, dark forests, and rushing torrents without bridges, are not to be evaded. God has not willed that any knowledge obtained at a slight expense of labour shall be of equal value to that which is acquired at a great expense. War may be talked of by poets and Quakers; but it is understood only by those who have gone through a campaign. Plato, in the same way, to be known, must be studied; and he must be studied, not with the head only, but, like the Bible, with the whole man; for a great writer, who brings his whole highly developed nature into play, can never be appropriated by one whose culture is fragmentary, and the notes of whose life have never been blended into a harmony of which any reasonable ear can take cognizance. As a whole, therefore, Plato never will be comprehended by the million; at least till the million possess a great deal more patience, love of truth, reach of thought, and contemplative subtlety than they have hitherto displayed. Under good guidance, indeed, individual dialogues of the great master idealist, whether in the original or in a good translation, may be read with pleasure and instruction by any man; but whoever buckles to Plato honestly, as a whole, will find that he is full of stumblingblocks, and that he bristles with offence; and, what will try the student's temper most, his most interesting dialogues often seem to lead nowhere, and to end, like Highland roads, in a bog.

The misfortune is that Plato is an intellect of such a world-commanding class, that any man who has opinions at all must have some opinions about him, just as he has about Homer and Mahomet. No man can say that the empire of Plato over the minds of thinking men has passed away, or can pass away. To call yourself a thinker and ignore Plato, is to say you are a builder, and never heard of Michael Angelo

and St. Peter's. You dare not say so; and therefore, if you don't really know anything of the architectural power of the great Florentine, you will, as vulgar honesty goes, pretend that you do so; your position will force you to make the best shift you can with the first best doğa, or mere OPINION on the matter since you cannot boast the stable certainty of Totýμn, or KNOWLEDGE. Now, in cases of this kind, we generally find that the popular opinion is founded on the most prominent and the most striking, but for that reason, often the most superficial feature in the interesting object of which a knowledge is pretended. That Cromwell had a wart on his nose; that Byron had a club foot, which gave him more anxiety than the critiques on his poems; that the head of Pericles was too long, for which reason the sculptors always made his bust helmeted, while that of Julius Caesar was bald, which made it doubly grateful to that great commander to have his brow encompassed with an oaken wreath, or the coveted kingly diadem; such prominent and superficial accessories of personal appearance, in the case of well-known characters, will often be familiar to thousands who know nothing more of the person so curiously characterised. But these, so far as they go, are certainly true; they are accurate knowledge, not mere opinion. Even vulgar opinion is not so often altogether false as it is partial and inadequate, and therefore unjust. Of Mahomet, for instance, everybody knows that he was the prophet of an intolerant religion, which its most sincere professors have always most zealously propagated with the sword. This is quite true; but it is far from embracing the whole truth with regard to the religion of the Koran; and he who, with the inconsiderate haste of popular logic, uses this accurate knowledge about a fraction of a thing, as if it were the just appreciation of the whole, falls not the less certainly into the region of mere doğa and delusion; for though the thing that he believes is true, it is not true as he gives it currency. He is in fact doing a thing in the region of ideas which is equivalent to passing a farthing for a guinea; an act whereby

A good example of this will be found in Lord Jeffrey's article BEAUTY, in the Encyclopædia Britannica,where the author makes a smart preliminary flourish about the Hippias, which to the intelligent merely shows that he knew nothing about Plato.

he swindles the public and himself very nearly as much as if he were to pass off a piece of painted pasteboard for the same value. Still a farthing is better than a piece of pasteboard; and so with regard to a great philosopher like Plato, the common opinion of the most ignorant, that he was a dreamer and a fantastic speculator, who was always wandering among clouds and sunbeams, and who taught the art of falling in love with the souls of persons who have no bodies-this vulgarest notion is so far true, that Plato, as contrasted with Aristotle, and other bare and square intellectual architects, did amuse himself with weaving tissues of beautiful iridescent speculation, and with sketching magnificent pictures of infinite worlds beyond the moon, for the decoration of the walls of his stable palace of the science of eternal ideas; but beyond this it is altogether false-as false as it would be to say that the granite mountain of Cairngorm, where the precious stones are dug, is made of velvet, because it is in fact, in many places, carpeted with a very delicate soft moss, on which the foot of the most dainty lady might tread with luxury.

So far we have been talking of Plato only as a man, and of his critics and commentators, and whosoever expresses opinions about him as men. But Plato was a Greek man; and we are English and Scottish men. Herein also lies the cause of no inconsiderable difficulty of adequate appreciation. That the Englishman is one of the most noble species of the genus to which he belongs seems to be generally conceded. The poet Southey expressed the opinion of more thinkers than himself when he said that the Englishman is the model or pattern man, at least of all the species at present existing. But even those who are most thoroughly convinced of this must admit that he has his peculiarities-peculiarities of such a nature as make it extremely difficult for him to pronounce an impartial judgment on the character and value of notable men belonging to other nations. One of the strongest features in the Englishman's character is his nationality; and one of the most striking traits of that nationality is pride. Both these qualities are a great bar in the way of honest appreciation of foreign excellence; for it is not by the narrowness of a national estimate, but by the breadth

Greek Philosophy in England.

5

of a cosmopolitan sympathy, not by the isolation of pride, but by the condescension and chivalrous acknowledgment of love, that we learn to know and to appreciate whatsoever is not ourselves and of ourselves. But there is another potent element in the English character which renders it peculiarly unfit for the appreciation of any phenomenon so essentially Greek as Plato. We are a practical people. This word "practical" is indeed the shibboleth by which we love to recognise ourselves; as the Greeks delighted to picture themselves as more wise, and the French as more polite than other nations. But the Greeks, as we all know, were in the highest degree a speculative, and a subtle, and an essentially unpractical people. Therefore, as like is only recognised by like, the Greek mind, or at least a great part of it, will always remain a mystery to the English mind. Let Greek grammars and Greek lexicons be multiplied to infinity; let certain plays of Euripides and certain treatises of Aristotle be commented on, so long as England shall be England, by all the aspirants to a mastership, a deanery, or a bishopric in the kingdom; let head masters of large schools, and tutors of colleges, dilate, in every varied form of mingled reason and sophistry, on the never sufficiently to be belauded advantages of a classical education; with all this the inner soul of Greece will not be known by, or knowable to, the normal Englishman; and Greek scholarship in England will be liable to become a thing, as we have too frequently seen it, altogether without a soul-a thing that deals merely with the external shell of learning, and amuses a snugly-cabined leisure with all sorts of grammatical fribbles, and philological card-castles. How little, indeed, the English mind, even in the case of professional scholars, is occupied with the problems proposed by Greek philosophy, is manifest from the fact that the most important articles on Greek philosophers in Doctor Smith's admirable Dictionary, are written not by Englishmen but by Germans. Our genius has a most real, concrete, and altogether terrestrial tendency; there seems to be a considerable majority of Sadducees amongst us, or, as Plato calls them, "uninitiated persons, who believe in nothing but what they can lay hold of with their hands." These men will make railways, telegraphs, and tunnels, and build crystal palaces, and collect