deeper sins, that he might get rid of the terrors of an upbraiding conscience! In laying open to our readers the manners and the doctrines of the Sophists we have been led, almost unawares, into a length, which may seem to have drawn us from the purpose for which these remarks were designed; but humour depends for its relish very frequently upon knowledge-knowledge not acquired at the moment, but fixed in the mind, and asking little explanation; for nobody, says a French critic, laughs, when there is need of an explanation to tell him, why he ought to laugh. It is only an intimate acquaintance with the state of manners, and the habits of society in the upper classes of society in Athens, which can give the reader a full idea of the Clouds of Aristophanes. It is then only that the full force of many of his single happy words can be understood, or those images raised in the mind, which mere words are sometimes calculated to light up. But our purpose must still lie by a little longer. Some doubt has been thrown on the veracity of the author, from whose writings these remarks have chiefly been suggested or collected; and an agreeable compiler, well known to scholars, would wish us to believe, that the master of the Academy acted the same part by the sophists of his day, as Aristophanes did by the great originator of the Grecian moral philosophy. The Dialogues of Plato do certainly, by the introduction of living characters, speaking freely and unreservedly, approach the nearest of any thing which antiquity has left us, to the modern novel, that dangerous species of literature, which has opened all the recesses of the heart, and left none of those sanctuaries unvisited into which a person's own thoughts should fear to penetrate. But, without adverting to the difference of manners between the Greeks and ourselves, without shewing that Athenæus, in attacking the character of Plato for veracity, has left his own reputation for truth in an awkward predicament; after admitting, in its fullest extent, the literary jealousy of Plato, which could bear no rival near his throne, it will be sufficient to say that we possess other means of establishing the truth of his observations. If such dark and malignant spirits, as Plato describes, had been at work with such doctrines as he details, their effects would be pretty visible in the annals of the times; for what is history but the register of opinion converted into fact? and how read we? what says the great contemporary chronicler? About this time,' says Thucydides, (and he is speaking of the period which immediately preceded the representation of the Clouds,) the received value of names imposed for signification of things, began to be changed into arbitrary: for inconsiderate boldness was counted true-hearted manliness; prudent deliberation, a handsome fear; modesty, the T 4 6 cloak cloak of cowardice; to be wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour. To re-advise for the better security, was held for a fair pretext of tergiversation. He that was fierce, was always trusty; and he that contraried such a one, was suspected. He that laid a snare, if it took, was a wise man; but he whose forecast discovered a snare laid, a more dangerous man than he: he that had been so prudent, as not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary. In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an ill act, or that could persuade another thereto, that never meant it, was commended. To be kin to another, was less binding than to be of his Society or Company; because these were ready to undertake the most hazardous enterprizes, and that without any pretext. For Societies* were not made upon prescribed laws of profit, but for rapine, contrary to the laws established. And as for mutual trust amongst them, it was confirmed not so much by oaths or divine law, as by the communication of guilt. And what was well advised of their adversaries, they received with an eye to their actions, to see whether they were too strong for them, or not, and not ingenuously. To be revenged was in more request, than never to have received injury. And for oaths (when any were) of reconcilement, being administered in the present for necessity, they were of force to such as had otherwise no power: but upon opportunity, he that first durst, thought his revenge sweeter by the trust, than if he had taken the open way. For they did not only put to account the safeness of that course, but having circumvented their adversary by fraud, they assumed to themselves with all, a mastery in point of wit. And dishonest men for the most part are sooner called able, than simple men honest. And men are ashamed of this title, but take a pride in the other. The cause of all this is desire of rule, out of avarice and ambition, and the zeal of contention from those two proceding. Thus was wickedness on foot in every kind, throughout all Greece, and sincerity (whereof there is much in a generous nature) was laughed down.'+ A Tragedy of manners, thus fearful, wanted a Gracioso to relieve some of its more sombre scenes, and the character was supplied in Aristophanes. To dispel by the powerful weapon of ridicule these mists of error, to give a finished picture of a man as he was likely to come from the hands of the Sophists, to rescue the young men of By societies are here meant companies united under certain laws for the more profitable management of their trades or arts. + Hobbes's Trans. of Thucydides, lib. ii. 198. Fol. ed. family from the hands of such flagitious preceptors, and restore them to that noble simplicity of manners, which had prevailed in Greece in the time of Homer, and which had not entirely disappeared even in the days of Herodotus, was unquestionably the object of the Clouds ;-it was a task of no ordinary kind, but the author has accomplished his purpose in one of those immortal dialogues, which, wrapped up in his own rich, mellifluous and inimitable versification, remains, to the moderns, like so many of the other great works of antiquity, at once an object of admiration and despair. If the mode* in which this admirable dialogue was conveyed, be such as to detract in our eyes somewhat from its merit, it must be remembered, that the persons for whose service it was intended, were not likely to be present at the recital of it, and that the reproof could only be dealt at secondhand through the medium of a clever, but noisy, conceited, and riotous mob, who required some compensation for having the merriment of their bacchanalian anniversary disturbed by satires upon the system of public education.-It now remained for the author to give a central figure to his piece; and the same regard to the quality of his audience, seems to have guided him also, in this stage of his progress. About the time when the play, called the Clouds, was brought before a public audience, a person was seen in all the streets and public places of Athens, whose appearance, manners and doctrines, equally tended to excite observation. If not a sophist himself, he was continually among them; and as he made no scruple to practise upon them the arts which they practised upon others, it is no wonder that an almost general opinion should have considered him as one of the profession; as a sophist more honest indeed than the rest, but in talent, in vanity, and self-conceit surpassing them all. Like the sophists and philosophers, he had given himself deeply and unremittedly to physical researches: and in a temperament naturally melancholy, it had produced such an effect upon his countenance and manners, that by the gayer part of his fellow-citizens, who wanted opportunities of knowing him more intimately, an introduction to his society was considered as something like venturing into the sombre cavern of Trophonius. And certainly there were not wanting reasons for forming such an opinion. Wrapt up in profound reveries, the * There can be little doubt, from the words of the scholiast, that the embodied Loga, or representatives of the two struggling and opposite sets of opinions in Athens, on the subjects of religion, manners, morals, music, &c. were exhibited to the audience, as two fighting cocks, in large wicker cages. Plato in Lachete, 246. D. E. F. 250. A. B. In Phædone, 392. Conv. Xen, 85. Mem. I. iv. c. 7. Arist. Nub, v. 509. ordinary ordinary functions of nature seemed sometimes suspended in him -the vicissitudes of day* and night passed unobserved, the necessary refections of rest and food were neglected, and he seemed to have derived from his own experience the reproach which he sometimes cast upon the other philosophers, that their native town had only possession of their bodies, but that the air was the chosen habitation of their minds. The pride of knowledge communicated a consequence which contrasted rather ridiculously with the humility of his external appearance; his air was stern,† his step was lofty, and his eyes, if not fixed upon the heavens, were thrown around with an appearance of conscious importance. He was rather ostentatious in proclaiming that his father had been a statuary, his mother a midwife; and he explained, in language highly ingenious, but rather more at length, perhaps, than was consistent with good taste, and certainly in terms which only a degraded state of female estimation would allow to be called decent, that the profession, which his mother had practised, was that which he also pursued; with this difference, that he performed for the intellect, what she had done for the body; and that while she confined her attentions to the female sex, his obstetric services had been devoted exclusively to the male. In his more convivial moments he had a term, by which he chose to characterize his pursuit, that requires still more circumlocution in mentioning; it will be sufficient to say, that it came nearest to that office, which is considered the most degrading that one man can perform for another; and he who had accidentally seen the author of it, coquetting with a grey-bearded brother in philosophy, and aping the manners of a courtezan who denies, only to be courted to do what she wishes,§ might have been justified in thinking, till circumstances had better informed him, that the pretended office was not merely assumed for the purposes of momentary pleasantry. By whatever name, however, he chose to term his vocation, certain it was, that no man could be more assiduous in the prosecution of it. Whoever was the disputant, or whatever the subject of conversation, the discourse finally fell upon the head of the person, with whom he was conversing. Armed with a divine commission, as he pretended for that purpose, and himself under the immediate direction of a supernatural being, not perfectly naturalized in the theology of his country, every man was questioned by him in turn, and found no respite, till he gave a complete ac * In Convivio. Plat. 316 B. 335 C. + In Phæd. 402 B. Conv. Plat. 335 F. in Nub. v. 363. Acibiade primo. 36. In Theæteto, 117. $ Conv. Xen. p. 86. The paraphrastic translation of the word Sguroμeros is given from Gray, whose erudition was as exact as his genius was sublime, count count of himself:—what was his present and what had been his past mode of life,—and once upon this topic, said one who knew him well, there is no hope of escape, till you have been put to the touchstone torture, and your whole life sifted to the bottom. So strong was this passion, that the attachment to rural scenes, which prevailed so strongly in most of his fellow-citizens, in him seemed a feeling almost extinct—he was a stranger to the environs of Athens, and was scarcely ever seen outside the walls. He could gain no instruction, he declared, from fields and trees, and nothing but a book could entice him to the banks of the Ilissus, or that more beautiful stream, where Venus* quenched her thirst, and in return blew over it the sweetest breath of the Zephyrs, and sent the Loves to be the companions of Wisdom. Man was his game; and from man he never wished to be absent; but the passion was by no means reciprocal: a catechist so inquisitorial was not always agreeable, and the presence of the philosopher either created a solitude where he went, or if he collected an audience, it was among the idle young men, who took a malicious pleasure in his cutting remarks, and who immediately left him to practise upon others the lessons which they had just received. In a town where the personal appearance of the male sex excited more comments and observation than the female,‡ even the exterior of this person was calculated to fix the attention of many, who were not disposed to penetrate beyond it; and whatever merriment was excited on this subject, it must be owned that himself was ever the first to set the joke afloat. His eyes (to use the words in which he was accustomed to draw his own figure, and in which we shall not scruple to follow him, for purposes which will appear hereafter) stood so forward in his head, that they enabled him not only to see straight before him, but even to look sideways; and he used in consequence to boast, that himself and a crab were, of all animals, the two best adapted for vision. As his eyes took in a larger field of vision, so his nostrils, from standing wide open, were formed to embrace a larger compass of smell. His nose, too, from its extreme depression, had in like manner its advantages; for had it been aquiline, instead of what it was, it might have stood like a wall of separation between his eyes, and thus have obstructed their vision. His mouth and his lips were equally subjects of pleasantry with him, and the latter, with reference to subjects, to which the decorousness of modern manners does not admit much allusion. With a view to reduce the periphery of his body, which certainly was not very exact in its proportions, he practised dancing, and *Euripides in Medeâ, 835. Conv. Xenoph. 82. § In eod. 66, 67. that |