of dialectics, with anything nearer than what the sophists and rhetoricians thought to effect by mere empiricism.

But if such arguments, however accurately they combine with the only true center-point of the whole, should still appear to any one insufficient to decide the period at which the work was written, let him further mark the innumerable proofs of the youthfulness of the work generally. Now these are to be found immediately in its whole style and colouring. It has a great inclination to the epideictic-to an ostentation of convincing power and superiority; for not only, first, the opponent set up is conquered with little trouble, and afterwards, in every instance in what follows, the preceding position outbidden, but even philosophy itself, in order to give it a lustre and excite our admiration, is praised chiefly, because it leaves far behind what men most praise and admire. Now this is in part involved in the subject-matter; but, in Plato subject and execution are thus necessarily consequent one upon the other, and the spirit is youthful throughout in which that general design is applied and continually worked upwards, through ascending degrees, till it reaches a point of extravagance. Look, first of all, but at the second speech-that speech which annihilates Lysias, then at the counter-speech which crushes, still more powerfully, the two preceding; observe how in them Plato showily appropriates to himself the great triumph of the Sophists, of defending opposite propositions one after the other, and, withal, the elaborate display immediately made of abundance of matter; in that every contradictory detail is despised as regards the speech itself, and only premised in the

dialogues as prefatory to it; then the apologetic confidence, which does not even attempt to deprecate the name of Eros as regards Socrates, or assume a milder instead, but even in a prayer for health and happiness, ends with love. Further, the investigation which declares what is most beautiful in this speech to be nothing but child's-play, and rejects it along with the first as if it were nothing; the bantering challenge to Lysias; the droll, comprehensive, and almost confusing polemics against the early rhetoricians, ridiculing unsparingly even what is good in their labours, because it does not proceed from right principles-and this to a length of which he would scarcely have thought them deserving at a later period, and which does itself make a somewhat ostentatious show of extent of reading; finally, as the culminating point in this epideixis, the exalted contempt, genuinely Socratic, for all writing and all oratorical speaking. Even in the outward form this youthful spirit betrays itself, in the constantly renewed luxuriance of the secondary subjects introduced at every resting point; in an animation in the dialogue, which cannot be quite defended against charges of effort and affectation; lastly also, in a somewhat immoderate introduction of the religious, and here and there even in a certain awkwardness in the transitions, not indeed in the speeches, but in the dialogistic half.

With this view, moreover, the historical indications in the work itself accurately coincide, leaving as they do no doubt remaining as to the time in which the dialogue plays, so to speak. It would indeed be useless to attempt to draw any proof whatever from these, and generally, with the exception of a few cases in which the impossibility of the composition prior to a

certain period is self-evident, it would be folly to form any conclusion upon historical grounds as to the time at which any work of Plato was written, if we are to grant what is maintained in Athenæus, that Phædrus could have been no contemporary at all of Socrates. For what writer ever allowed himself such latitude, unless he was one in whose eyes nothing was improbable, and for whom no impropriety was too great? Not indeed that Plato was to be bound to strict historical accuracy, or as if no offence against the order of time is to be met with in him. On the contrary, it may indeed be the case in dialogues which were transposed into a period pretty remote from that of their composition, that he starts away from, and leaves, his hypothetical grounds, whether from error of memory and negligence, or from his knowingly sacrificing historical truth for sake of a certain effect. But this is one thing, and it is another to introduce, as must here be the case, two men as the only acting personages, who, as every one knew, were not even in existence at the same time. And what was likely to have influenced Plato to such a course ? For one circumstance of the Phædrus would be then of no value for the dialogue, as there could be no want of a contemporary confidant and admirer of Lysias among the young Athenians, and any one to whom he had here transferred the character of Phædrus, might have also delivered the speech spoken by him in the Symposium. Nay, what cause could there have been for making this same impossible interlocutor come forward in the Protagoras, where, as a mute spectator, he only swells the accumulated crowd? We would not therefore take this even upon the word of Athenæus unless he communicates to us some of his

more accurate sources of information as to this Phædrus, and so unproven an accusation is not to prevent us from treating our dialogue, in what we have to say further, as if it were possible to draw conclusions from historical relations contained in it. This premised, we add that two very well known personages are there mentioned in a very decisive manner-Lysias, namely, and Isocrates. Lysias, in Ol. LXXXIV. 1, had travelled at the age of fifteen years to Thurium, and returned, as Dionysius tells us, when forty-seven years old, in the first year of the ninety-second Olympiad, from which period his great fame as an orator first commences. Now if we allow still some years to pass before Phædrus can say of him, as something generally granted, that he wrote best of all his contemporaries, this dialogue cannot have been held earlier than in the ninetythird Olympiad. And certainly not later, for Lysias could not well be more than fifty years old to write of and expound love-matters without shame, as Isocrates, two and twenty years younger, could not have been much above thirty, to be brought forward as a young man. To this may be added the mention of Polemarchus as a living personage, who, according to Plutarch and the composer of the Lives of the Ten Orators, perished in the anarchy. Now all this does indeed point immediately only to the time at which the dialogue may have taken place: but when considered more accurately, we have from these grounds the further result, that it cannot have been written much later; in which case it is at once self-evident, that Plato, who at that time had not been long a scholar of Socrates, could not as yet have written anything of this description, but that the Phædrus was the first burst of the

inspiration drawn from Socrates.

For,

For, first, every man's own feeling will tell him that the manner in which Plato introduces the speech of Lysias could only have had its proper effect while this publication was fresh in the memory of the readers of the Phædrus, and that upon the contrary supposition there would not only be a degree of awkwardness about it, but it would be difficult even to conceive how Plato should have fallen in with it. Nay, when we consider further how hardly he treats Lysias, he would have subjected himself to a heavy charge of injustice, had he at a later period in his criticism upon him taken for the basis of it an old and almost forgotten piece, and one long ago superseded by many far more perfect. Moreover to what end the mention of Polemarchus' transition to Philosophy? as he died so soon after it, he could scarcely have supplied an illustrious example for a later period than the one we have fixed upon. But what chiefly speaks in favour of the composition of the dialogue contemporaneously with those occurrences is the prophecy respecting Isocrates which appears towards the end of the dialogue, and which cannot possibly have been spoken retrospectively, namely that he would far surpass all rhetoricians hitherto, and rise to a higher kind of composition. For supposing what this orator afterwards performed to have answered Plato's expectations, it was in that case, to say the least of it, ridiculous to make this be predicted at a far earlier period; but if Isocrates did not come up to those expectations, Plato would in that case knowingly and purposely have either told a false prophecy of Socrates, or falsely attributed such to him. But that prophecy seems to have reference to an idea, which in several passages in this dialogue is

I