Athens was built a thousand years before Sais, by the goddess Neithes, as they call her, but as we, Athenè, who received the seed of the city from the Earth and Vulcan. The records of Athens are lost, and those of Sais mount up no higher than eight thousand years. Enough to make her talk like an old woman.

I have, in other places and on other occasions, remarked to those about me many, if not equal and similar, yet gross absurdities in thy writings. Plato. Gently! I know it. Several of these, supposing them to be what you denominate them, are originally from others, and from the gravest

men.

Diogenes. Gross absurdities are usually of that parentage: the idle and weak produce but petty ones, and such as gambol at theatres and fairs. Thine are good for nothing: men are too old, and children too young, to laugh at them. There is no room for excuse or apology in the adoption of another's foolery. Imagination may heat a writer to such a degree, that he feels not what drops from him or clings to him of his own: another's is taken up deliberately, and trimmed at leisure. I will now proceed with thee. I have heard it affirmed (but, as philosophers are the affirmers, the assertion may be questioned), that there is not a notion or idea, in the wide compass of thy works, originally thy own.

on you the accusation of employing any language or any sentiments but your own, unquestionably the purest and most genuine Sinopèan.

Diogenes. Welcome to another draught of it, my courteous guest! By thy own confession, or rather thy own boast, thou stolest every idea thy voluminous books convey; and therefore thou wouldst persuade us that all other ideas must have an archetype; and that God himself, the Demiurgos, would blunder and botch without one. Now can not God, by thy good leave, gentle Plato! quite as easily form a thing as conceive it? and execute it as readily at once as at twice? Or hath he rather, in some slight degree, less of plastic power than of mental? Seriously, if thou hast received these fooleries from the Egyptian priests, prythee, for want of articles more valuable to bring among us, take them back on thy next voyage, and change them against the husk of a pistachio dropt from the pouch of a sacred ape.

Thy God is like thyself, as most men's Gods are: he throws together a vast quantity of stuff, and leaves his workpeople to cut it out and tack it together, after their own fashion and fancy. These demons or genii are mischievous and fantastical imps: it would have been better if they had always sitten with their hands before them, or played and toyed with one another, like the young folks in the garden of Academus. As

:

Diogenes. If I throw my cloak over a fugitive slave to steal him, it is so short and strait, so thread bare and chinky, that he would be recognised by the idlest observer who had seen him seven years ago in the market-place but if thou hadst enveloped him in thy versicoloured and cloudlike vestiary, puffed and effuse, rustling and rolling, nobody could guess well what animal was under it, much less what man. And such a tissue would conceal a gang of them, as easily as it would a parsley-bed, or the study yonder of young Demosthenes. Therefore, I no more wonder that thou art tempted to run in chase of butterflies, and catchest many, than I am at discovering that thou breakest their wings and legs by the weight of the web thou throwest over them; and that we find the head of one indented into the body of another, and never an individual retaining the colour or character of any species. Thou hast indeed, I am inclined to believe, some ideas of thy own for instance, when thou tellest us that a well-governed city ought to let her walls go to sleep along the ground. Pallas forbid that any city should do it where thou art! for thou wouldst surely deflower her, before the soldiers of the enemy could break in on the same errand. The poets are bad enough: they every now and then want a check upon them: but there must be an eternal vigilance against philosophers. Yet I would not drive you all out of the city-gates, because I fain would keep the country parts from pollution.

Plato. Certainly, O Diogenes, I can not retort

before thee, so those who follow thee will modify thine. The wiser of them will believe, and reasonably enough, that it is time for the Demiurgos to lay his head upon his pillow, after heating his brains with so many false conceptions, and to let the world go on its own way, without any anxiety or concern.

Beside, would not thy dialogues be much better and more interesting, if thou hadst given more variety to the characters, and hadst introduced them conversing on a greater variety of topics? Thyself and Prodicus, if thou wouldst not disdain to meet him, might illustrate the nature of allegory, might explain to your audience where it can enter gracefully, and where it must be excluded: we should learn from you, perhaps, under whose guidance it first came into Greece: whether anyone has mentioned the existence of it in the poems of Orpheus and Musæus (now so lost that we possess no traces of them), or whether it was introduced by Homer, and derived from the tales and mythology of the East. Certainly he has given us for deities such personages as were never worshipped in our country; some he found, I suspect, in the chrysalis state of metaphors, and hatched them by the warmth of his genius into allegories, giving them a strength of wing by which they were carried to the summit of Olympus. Euripides and Aristophanes might discourse upon comedy and tragedy, and upon that species of poetry which, though the earliest and most universal, was cultivated in Attica with little success until the time of Sophocles. Plato. You mean the Ode.

Diogenes. I do. There was hardly a corner of Greece, hardly an islet, where the children of Pallas were not called to school and challenged by choristers.

There are many who marry from utter indigence of thought, captivated by the playfulness of youth, as if a kitten were never to be a cat! Socrates was an unlikely man to have been under

Diogenes. Rather say, ill-suited thy genius; having laid down no plan whatever for a series of dialogues. School-exercises, or, if thou pleasest to call them so, disquisitions, require no such form as thou hast given to them, and they block up the inlets and outlets of conversation, which, to seem natural, should not adhere too closely to one subject. The most delightful parts both of philosophy and of fiction might have opened and expanded before us, if thou hadst selected some fifty or sixty of the wisest, most eloquent, and most facetious, and hadst made them exert their abilities on what was most at their command.

Plato. I am not certain that I could have given to Aristophanes all his gaiety and humour. Diogenes. Art thou certain thou hast given to Socrates all his irony and perspicacity, or even all his virtue?

Plato. His virtue I think I have given him fully. Diogenes. Few can comprehend the whole of it, or see where it is separated from wisdom. Being a philosopher, he must have known that marriage would render him less contemplative and less happy, though he had chosen the most beautiful, the most quiet, the most obedient, and most affectionate woman in the world; yet he preferred what he considered his duty as a citizen to his peace of mind.

Plato. He might hope to beget children in sagacity like himself.

tell us that he married the too handy Xantippe for the purpose of exercising his patience, turn him from a philosopher into a fool. We should be at least as moderate in the indulgence of those matters which bring our patience into play, as in the indulgence of any other. It is better to be sound than hard, and better to be hard than callous.

Plato. Do you say that, Diogenes?

Diogenes. I do say it; and I confess to thee that I am grown harder than is well for me. Thou wilt not so easily confess that an opposite course of life hath rendered thee callous. Frugality and severity must act upon us long and uninterruptedly before they produce this effect: pleasure and selfishness soon produce the other. The red-hot iron is but one moment in sending up its fumes from the puddle it is turned into, and in losing its brightness and its flexibility.

Plato. I have admitted your definitions, and now I accede to your illustrations. But illustra tions are pleasant merely; and definitions are easier than discoveries.

Diogenes. The easiest things in the world when they are made: nevertheless thou hast given us some dozens, and there is hardly a complete or a just one on the list; hardly one that any wench, watching her bees and spinning on Hymettus, might not have corrected.

Plato. As you did, no doubt, when you threw into my school the cock you had stripped of its feathers.

Diogenes. Even to the present day, neither thou nor any of thy scholars have detected the fallacy.

Plato. Here then is no proof of his prudence or his virtue. True indeed is your remark on the children of the contemplative; and we have usually found them rejected from the higher offices, to punish them for the celebrity of their fathers.

Diogenes. Why didst not thou introduce thy preceptor arguing fairly and fully on some of these topics? Wert thou afraid of disclosing his inconsistencies? A man to be quite consistent must live quite alone. I know not whether Socrates would have succeeded in the attempt; I only know I have failed.

Plato. I hope, most excellent Diogenes, I shall not be accused of obstructing much longer so desirable an experiment.

Diogenes. I will bear with thee some time yet. The earth is an obstruction to the growth of seed; but the seed can not grow well without it. When I have done with thee, I will dismiss thee with my usual courtesy.

Diogenes. I do not mean that.

Plato. What then?

Diogenes. I would remark that neither thou nor thy disciples found me out.

Plato. We saw you plainly enough: we heard you too, crying, Behold Plato's man!

Diogenes. It was not only a reproof of thy temerity in definitions, but a trial of the facility with which a light and unjust ridicule of them would be received.

Plato. Unjust perhaps not, but certainly rude and vulgar.

Diogenes. Unjust, I repeat it because thy de finition was of man as nature formed him: and the cock, when I threw it on the floor, was ne longer as nature had formed it. Thou art accustomed to lay down as peculiarities the attributes that belong, equally or nearly, to several things or persons.

Plato. The characteristic is not always the definition, nor meant to be accepted for it. I have called tragedy δημοτερπέστατον, ‘most delightful to

the people,' and uxaywyikwтatov, ‘most agitating to the soul' no person can accuse me of laying down these terms as the definition of tragedy. The former is often as applicable to rat-catching, and the latter to cold-bathing. I have called the dog póuales, fond of acquiring information,' and pióropov, 'fond of wisdom;' but I never have denied that man is equally or more.

Diogenes. Deny it then instantly. Every dog has that property; every man has not: I mean the pixóμabes. The pióropov is false in both cases; for words must be taken as they pass current in our days, and not according to any ancient acceptation. The author of the Margites says,

Τόνδ' ουτ' ἂν σκαπῆρα θεὸς θέσαν ουτ' ἀροτῆρα,
Ουτ ̓ ἄλλως τι σοφόν.

Here certainly the σopós has no reference to the higher intellectual powers, as with us, since he is placed by the poet among delvers and ploughmen. The compound word pióropos did not exist when the author of Margites wrote; and the lover of wisdom, in his days, was the lover of the country. Her aspirants, in ours, are quarreling and fighting in the streets about her; and nevertheless, while they rustle their Asiatic robes around them, leave her as destitute, as naked, and as hungry as they found her.

Plato. Did your featherless cock render her any service?

Diogenes. Yes.

Tigers and serpents seize on the unwary, and inflict deadly wounds tigers from sport or hunger, serpents from fear or hurt: neither of them from malice, neither of them from hatred. Dogs indeed and horses do acquire hatred in their domestic state: they had none originally : they must sleep under man's roof before they share with him his high feeling that high feeling which renders him the destroyer of his own kind, and the devourer of his own heart. We are willing to consider both revenge and envy as much worse blemishes in the character than malice. Yet for one who is invidious there are six or seven who are malicious, and for one who is revengeful there are fifty. In revenge there must be something of energy, however short-breathed and indeterminate. Many are exempt from it because they are idle and forgetful; more, because they are circumspect and timid; but nothing hinders the same people from being malicious. Envy, abominable as we call her, and as she is, often stands upon a richly-figured base, and is to be recognised only by the sadness with which she leans over the emblems of power and genius. The contracted heart of Malice can never swell to sadness. Seeing nothing that she holds desirable, she covets nothing; she would rather the extinction than the possession of what is amiable; she hates high and low, bad and good, coldly pertinacious and lazily morose.

Thou, Plato, who hast cause to be invidious of

Diogenes. Not without it: the best assistance is the first, and the first was the detection of insufficiency and error. Thy addition was, 'that man has broad nails:' now art thou certain that all monkeys have sharp and round ones? I have heard the contrary; and I know that the mole has them broad and flat.

Plato. What wouldst thou say man is, and other animals are not?

Diogenes. I would say, lying and malicious. Plato. Because he alone can speak; he alone can reflect.

fine, being rendered thereby the poorest I know in any Athenian ambitious of it.

Plato. If the fact be thus, the reason is different. Diogenes. What is it then?

Plato. That every witticism is an inexact thought: that what is perfectly true is imperfectly witty: and that I have attended more sedulously and more successfully to verity.

Diogenes. Why not bring the simplicity of truth into the paths of life? why not try whether it would look as becomingly in actions as in words; in the wardrobe and at table as in deductions and syllogisms? why not demonstrate to the youth of Athens that thou in good earnest canst be contented with a little?

Plato. So I could, if the times required it. Diogenes. They will soon; and we should at least be taught our rudiments, before a hard lesson is put into our hands.

Plato. Having kept in their memory an evil received, many of them evince their malice, by attacking long afterward those who did it.

Diogenes. This is not malice, in man or beast. Malice is ill-will without just cause, and desire to injure without any hope of benefiting from it.

verse

Diogenes. What second verse? Were we talking of any such things?

Plato. Yes, just now.
Diogenes. I had forgotten it.

Plato. How! forgotten the Margites! The meaning of the words is, 'nor fit for anything else.'

Homer in like manner uses eidés very frequently, to indicate mere manual skill. The spirit of inquiry, the piñóμades, we take upon ourselves

with the canine attributes: we talk of indagating, of investigating, of questing.

Diogenes. I know the respect thou bearest to the dogly character, and can attribute to nothing else the complacency with which thou hast listened to me since I released thy cloak. If ever the Athenians, in their inconstancy, should issue a decree to deprive me of the appellation they have conferred on me, rise up, I pray thee, in my defence, and protest that I have not merited so severe a mulct. Something I do deserve at thy hands; having supplied thee, first with a store of patience, when thou wert going without any about thee, although it is the readiest viaticum and the heartiest sustenance of human life; and then with weapons from this tub, wherewith to drive the importunate cock before thee out of doors again. 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 Sinope, 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 Sinope 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 favour 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 Sinope 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 unnecessary and inelegant; for instance his coinage of τραπεζότης and κυαθότης, 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.

faults of Plato he ridiculed his affectation of new words,

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 was 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 honour of her gods.

Newton. I come, sir, before you with fear and trembling, at the thoughts of my examination to-morrow. If the masters are too hard upon me, I shall never take my degree. How I passed as bachelor I can not tell it must surely have been by especial indulgence.

Barrow. My dear Isaac! do not be dispirited. The less intelligent of the examiners will break their beaks against the gravel, in trying to cure the indigestions and heart-burnings your plenteousness has given them: the more intelligent know your industry, your abilities, and your modesty they would favour you, if there were need of favour, but you, without compliment, surpass them all.

Newton. O sir! forbear, forbear! I fear I may have forgotten a great deal of what you taught me. Barrow. I wonder at that. I am older than you by many years; I have many occupations and distractions; my memory is by nature less retentive; and yet I have not forgotten anything you taught me.

Newton. Too partial tutor, too benevolent

friend! this unmerited praise confounds me. I can not calculate the powers of my mind, otherwise than by calculating the time I require to compass anything.

Barrow. Quickness is among the least of the mind's properties, and belongs to her in almost her lowest state: nay, it doth not abandon her when she is driven from her home, when she is wandering and insane. The mad often retain it: the liar has it, the cheat has it: we find it on the race-course and at the card-table: education does not give it, and reflection takes away from it.

Newton. I am slow; and there are many parts of ordinary learning yet unattained by me.

Barrow. I had an uncle, a sportsman, who said that the light dog beats over most ground, but the heavier finds the covey.

Newton. Oftentimes indeed have I submitted to you problems and possibilities .

Barrow. And I have made you prove them. Newton. You were contented with me; all may not be.

Barrow. All will not be many would be more