Diogenes. Why not? Thou shouldst be the last man to doubt it. Hast not thou declared it irrational to refuse our belief to those who assert that they are begotten by the gods, though the assertion (these are thy words) be unfounded on reason or probability? In me there is a chance of it: whereas in the generation of such people as thou art fondest of frequenting, who claim it loudly, there are always too many competitors to leave it probable.

Plato. Those who speak against the great, do not usually speak from morality, but from envy.

Diogenes. Thou hast a glimpse of the truth in this place; but as thou hast already shown thy ignorance in attempting to prove to me what a man is, ill can I expect to learn from thee what is a great man.

Plato. No doubt your experience and intercourse will afford me the information.

Diogenes. Attend, and take it. The great man is he who hath nothing to fear and nothing to hope from another. It is he who, while he demonstrates the iniquity of the laws, and is able to correct them, obeys them peaceably. It is he who looks on the ambitious both as weak and fraudulent. It is he who hath no disposition or occasion for any kind of deceit, no reason for being or for appearing different from what he is. It is he who can call together the most select company when it pleases him.

Plato. Excuse my interruption. In the beginning of your definition I fancied that you were designating your own person, as most people do in describing what is admirable; now I find that you have some other in contemplation.

Diogenes. I thank thee for allowing me what perhaps I do possess, but what I was not then thinking of; as is often the case with rich possessors in fact, the latter part of the description suits me as well as any portion of the former.

Plato. You may call together the best company, by using your hands in the call, as you did with me; otherwise I am not sure that you would succeed in it.

Diogenes. My thoughts are my company: I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them. Imbecile and vicious men can not do any of these things. Their thoughts are scat tered, vague, uncertain, cumbersome; and the worst stick to them the longest; many indeed by choice, the greater part by necessity, and accompanied, some by weak wishes, others by vain

remorse.

Plato. Is there nothing of greatness, O Diogenes in exhibiting how cities and communities may be governed best, how morals may be kept the purest, and power become the most stabile?

Diogenes. Something of greatness does not constitute the great man. Let me however see him who hath done what thou sayest. He must be the

Diogenes. Because he must know perfectly the climate, the soil, the situation, the peculiarities, of the races, of their allies, of their enemies: he must have sounded their harbours, he must have measured the quantity of their arable land and pasture, of their woods and mountains: he must have ascertained whether there are fisheries on their coasts, and even what winds are prevalent.* On these causes, with some others, depend the bodily strength, the numbers, the wealth, the wants, the capacities, of the people.

Plato. Such are low thoughts.

Diogenes. The bird of wisdom flies low, and seeks her food under hedges: the eagle himself would be starved if he always soared aloft and against ¦ the sun. The sweetest fruit grows near the ground, and the plants that bear it require ventilation and lopping. Were this not to be done in thy garden, every walk and alley, every plot and border, would be covered with runners and roots, with boughs and suckers. We want no poets or logicians or metaphysicians to govern us: we want practical men, honest men, continent men, unambitions men, fearful to solicit a trust, slow to accept, and resolute never to betray one. Experimentaliste may be the best philosophers; they are always the worst politicians. Teach people their duties, and they will know their interests. Change as little as possible, and correct as much.

And

Philosophers are absurd from many causes, but principally from laying out unthriftily their distinctions. They set up four virtues: fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice. Now a man may be a very bad one, and yet possess three out of the four. Every cut-throat must, if he has been a cut-throat on many occasions, have more fortitude and more prudence than the greater part of those whom we consider as the best men. what cruel wretches, both executioners and judges, have been strictly just! how little have they cared what gentleness, what generosity, what genius, their sentence hath removed from the earth' Temperance and beneficence contain all other virtues. Take them home, Plato, split them. expound them; do what thou wilt with them, if thou but use them.

Before I gave thee this lesson, which is a better than thou ever gavest anyone, and easier to re member, thou wert accusing me of invidiousness and malice against those whom thou callest the great, meaning to say the powerful. Thy ima gination, I am well aware, had taken its flight toward Sicily, where thou seekest thy great man. as earnestly and undoubtingly as Ceres sought her Persephone. Faith! honest Plato, I have no reason to envy thy worthy friend Dionysius. Look at my nose! A lad seven or eight years old threw an apple at me yesterday, while I was

* Parts of knowledge which are now general, but were

formerly very rare, and united in none.

I was going on to demonstrate, is somewhat more. He must be able to do this, and he must have an intellect which puts into motion the intellect of others.

Plato. Socrates then was your great man. Diogenes. He was indeed; nor can all thou hast attributed to him ever make me think the contrary. I wish he could have kept a little more at home, and have thought it as well worth his while to converse with his own children as with others.

Plato. He knew himself born for the benefit of the human race.

Diogenes. Those who are born for the benefit of the human race, go but little into it: those who are born for its curse, are crowded.

Plato. It was requisite to dispell the mists of ignorance and error.

Diogenes. Has he done it? What doubt has he elucidated, or what fact has he established? Although I was but twelve years old and resident in another city when he died, I have taken some pains in my inquiries about him from persons of less vanity and less perverseness than his disciples. He did not leave behind him any true philosopher among them; any who followed his mode of argumentation, his subjects of disquisition, or his course of life; any who would subdue the malignant passions or coerce the looser; any who would abstain from calumny or from cavil; any who would devote his days to the glory of his country, or, what is easier and perhaps wiser, to his own well-founded contentment and well-merited repose. Xenophon, the best of them, offered up sacrifices, believed in oracles, consulted soothsayers, turned pale at a jay, and was dysenteric at a magpie.

Plato. He had then no courage? I was the first to suspect it.

Diogenes. Which thou hadst never been if others had not praised him for it: but his courage was of so strange a quality, that he was ready, if jay or magpie did not cross him, to fight for Spartan or Persian. Plato, whom thou esteemest much more, and knowest somewhat less, careth as little for portents and omens as doth Diogenes. What he would have done for a Persian I can not say: certain I am that he would have no more fought for a Spartan than he would for his own father: yet he mortally hates the man who hath a kinder muse or a better milliner, or a seat nearer the minion of a king. So much for the two disciples of Socrates who have acquired the greatest celebrity!

Plato. Why do you attribute to me invidiousness and malignity, rather than to the young philosopher who is coming prematurely forward into public notice, and who hath lately been invited by the King of Macedon to educate his son?

Diogenes. These very words of thine demonstrate to me, calm and expostulatory as they appear in utterance, that thou enviest in this young man, if not his abilities, his appointment. And prythee now demonstrate to me as clearly, if

thou canst, in what he is either a sycophant or a malignant.

Plato. Willingly.

Diogenes. I believe it. But easily too?

Plato. I think so. Knowing the arrogance of Philip, and the signs of ambition which his boy (I forget the name) hath exhibited so early, he says, in the fourth book of his Ethics (already in the hands of several here at Athens, although in its present state unfit for publication), that “he who deems himself worthy of less than his due, is a man of pusillanimous and abject mind."

Diogenes. His canine tooth, friend Plato, did not enter thy hare's fur here.

Plato. No; he sneered at Phocion, and flattered Philip. He adds, "whether that man's merits be great, or small, or middling." And he supports the position by sophistry.

Diogenes. How could he act more consistently! Such is the support it should rest on. If the man's merits were great, he could not be abject. Plato. Yet the author was so contented with his observation, that he expresses it again a hundred lines below.

Diogenes. Then he was not contented with his observation; for, had he been contented, he would have said no more about it. But, having seen lately his treatise, I remember that he varies the expression of the sentiment, and, after saying a very foolish thing, is resolved on saying one rather less inconsiderate: on the principle of the hunter on the snows of Pindus, who, when his | fingers are frost-bitten, does not hold them instantly to the fire, but dips them first into cold water. Aristoteles says, in his second trial at the thesis, "for he who is of low and abject mind, strips himself of what is good about him, and is, to a certain degree, bad, because he thinks himself unworthy of the good."

Modesty and diffidence make a man unfit for public affairs: they also make him unfit for brothels: but do they therefore make him bad! It is not often that your scholar is lost in this way, by following the echo of his own voice. His greatest fault is, that he so condenses his thoughts as to render it difficult to see through them: he inspissates his yellow to black. However, I see more and more in him the longer I look at him: in you I see less and less. Perhaps other men may have eyes of another construction, and filled with a subtiler and more etherial fluid,

Plato. Acknowledge at least that it argues a poverty of thought to repeat the same sentiment.

Diogenes. It may or it may not. Whatever of ingenuity or invention be displayed in a remark, another may be added which surpasses it. If. after this and perhaps more, the author, in a different treatise, or in a different place of the same, throws upon it fresh materials, surely you must allow that he rather hath brought forward the evidence of plenteousness than of poverty. Much of invention may be exhibited in the variety of turns and aspects he makes his thesis assume. A poor friend may give me to-day a portion of

yesterday's repast; but a rich man is likelier to send me what is preferable, forgetting that he had sent me as much a day or two before. They who give us all we want, and beyond what we expected, may be pardoned if they happen to overlook the extent of their liberality. In this matter thou hast spoken inconsiderately and unwisely: but whether the remark of Aristoteles was intended as a slur on Phocion is uncertain. The repetition of it makes me incline to think it was; for few writers repeat a kind sentiment, many an unkind one and Aristoteles would have repeated a just observation rather than an unjust, unless he wished either to flatter or malign. The gods rarely let us take good aim on these occasions, but dazzle or overcloud us. The perfumed oil of flattery, and the caustic spirit of malignity, spread over an equally wide surface. Here both are thrown out of their jars by the same pair of hands at the same moment; the sweet (as usual) on the bad man, the unsweet (as universal) on the good. I never heard before that they had fallen on the hands of Phocion and of Philip. Thou hast furnished me with the suspicion, and I have furnished thee with the supports for it. Do not, however, hope to triumph over Aristoteles, because he hath said one thoughtless thing: rather attempt to triumph with him on saying many wise ones. For a philosopher I think him very little of an impostor. He mingles too frequently the acute and dull; and thou too frequently the sweet and vapid. Try to barter one with the other, amicably; and not to twitch and carp. You may each be the better for some exchanges; but neither for cheapening one another's wares. Do thou take my advice the first of the two; for thou hast the most to gain by it. Let me tell thee also that it does him no dishonour to have accepted the invitation of Philip as future preceptor of his newlyborn child. I would rather rear a lion's whelp and tame him, than see him run untamed about the city, especially if any tenement and cattle were at its outskirts. Let us hope that a soul once Attic can never become Macedonian; but rather Macedonian than Sicilian.

Aristoteles, and all the rest of you, must have the wadding of straw and saw-dust shaken out, and then we shall know pretty nearly your real weight and magnitude.

Plato. A philosopher ought never to speak in such a manner of philosophers.

Diogenes. None other ought, excepting now and then the beadle. However, the gods have well protected thee, O Plato, against his worst violence. Was this raiment of thine the screen of an Egyptian temple? or merely the drapery of a thirty-cubit Isis? or peradventure a holiday suit of Darius for a bevy of his younger concubines? Prythee do tarry with me, or return another day, that I may catch a flight of quails with it as they cross over this part of Attica.

Plato. It hath always been the fate of the decorous to be calumniated for effeminacy by the sordid. Diogenes. Effeminacy! By my beard! he who

could carry all this Milesian bravery on his shoulders, might, with the help of three more such able men, have tost Typhoëus up to the teeth of Jupiter.

Plato. We may serve our country, I hope, with clean faces.

Diogenes. More serve her with clean faces than with clean hands: and some are extremely shy of her when they fancy she may want them.

Plato. Although on some occasions I have left Athens, I can not be accused of deserting her in the hour of danger.

Diogenes. Nor proved to have defended her: but better desert her on some occasions, or on all, than praise the tyrant Critias; the cruellest of the thirty who condemned thy master. In one hour, in the hour when that friend was dying, when young and old were weeping over him, where then wert thou?

Plato. Sick at home.

Diogenes. Sick! how long? of what malady? In such torments, or in such debility, that it would have cost thee thy life to have been carried to the prison? or hadst thou no litter; no slaves to bear it; no footboy to inquire the way to the public prison, to the cell of Socrates? The medicine he took could never have made thy heart colder, or thy legs more inactive and torpid in their movement toward a friend. Shame upon thee! scorn! contempt! everlasting reprobation and abhorrence! Plato. Little did I ever suppose that, in being accused of hard-heartedness, Diogenes would exercise the office of accuser.

Diogenes. Not to press the question, nor to avoid the recrimination, I will enter on the subject at large; and rather as an appeal than as a disquisition. I am called hard-hearted; Alcibiades is called tender-hearted. Speak I truly or falsely? Plato. Truly.

Diogenes. In both cases?
Plato. In both.

Diogenes. Pray, in what doth hardness of heart consist?

Plato. There are many constituents and indications of it: want of sympathy with our species is one.

Diogenes. I sympathise with the brave in their adversity and afflictions, because I feel in my own breast the flame that burns in theirs and I do not sympathise with others, because with others my heart hath nothing of consanguinity. I no more sympathise with the generality of mankind than I do with fowls, fishes, and insects. We have indeed the same figure and the same flesh, but not the same soul and spirit. Yet, recall to thy memory, if thou canst, any action of mine bringing pain of body or mind to any rational creature. True indeed, no despot or conqueror should exercise his authority a single hour if my arm or my exhortations could prevail against him. Nay more: none should depart from the earth without flagellations, nor without brands, nor without exposure, day after day, in the market-place of the city where he governed. This is the only way I