SOCRATES.

SELF-KNOWING, therefore humbled to the dust,
Self-curbing, therefore in a sensual age
Pure, patriotic, mild, religious, just,

Self-taught, yet moderate,-Athenian sage,
Albeit but faintly the recording page
Samples the precious harvest of thy brain,
Where Plato's self, thine intellectual son,
And the scarr'd hand of gallant Xenophon
Have gathered up the fragments that remain

Of thy large speech, with wondrous wisdom fraught, From those rich morsels we may guess the feast, And note the Pisgah-summit of thy thought Bright with true trust, that God hath never ceased To care for all creative love hath wrought.

Socrates, the moral glory of the heathen world, whose unassisted reason arrived at the grand truths of a superintending Providence, a one omnipresent God, the beauty and expediency of good works, the soul's immortality, and the probable hope of redemption from evil, enlightened the world during half of the fifth century before Christ, having died at the age of seventy, in the ninety-sixth Olympiad. He is believed to have written very little beyond a paraphrase of Æsop, but fortunately at once for his fame, and our instruction, minute records of his precepts and practice have come down to us from the pens of his illustrious pupils Plato and Xenophon. The memorabilia of the latter, who was renowned as much for generalship as for the more peaceful pursuits of literature, furnish us with a faithful portrait of the man, who may be called the heathen protomartyr of truth; and the Dialogues and Apology of the former pupil convey to us the leading principles of the Socratic philosophy, although very copiously mingled with the vague conceits and obscure doctrines of Platonism.

The grand outlines in the life of Socrates are too accessible to every reader to require much notice in this place. Born of humble parents, a stone-cutter

and a nurse, he nevertheless found in Crito a Mæcenas to lead him through philosophy to fortune, and although he rose to the highest eminence as a sage, he never would accept the smallest fee for his instructions, and never made use of his influence to promote his own advancement. Though dwarfish in stature, and unwarlike in disposition, he yet had the glory of saving single-handed in fight both Xenophon and Alcibiades; when derided on the stage by the galling satire of Aristophanes, in the midst of the representation he had the magnanimity to stand up, and so changed derision into applause: and when iniquitously condemned on a false charge he was offered the means of escape, he nobly rejected them, as unworthy of his high character and honourable fame. And so, for envy of his virtues, a victim to plebeian hate, perished the wisest of the heathen world. The personal appearance of Socrates is universally allowed to have been very far from well favoured; all the likenesses of him extant upon antique gems and sculptures represent him as short, deformed, large headed, and most indifferently featured: but we may perhaps be startled to find that, according to the following authority, the great Socrates has been numbered among the seven ugliest of the world. A curious MS in the author's possession, quoting from the Officina of Textorinus, gives as the greatest monsters of deformity that the earth ever saw, "Hipponax, Iambographus, Thersites, Æsopus, Polyphemus, Socrates, et Epictetus." What an opportunity

for the remorseless comedian; we may fancy the ludicrous effect of an ugliness scarcely capable of caricature, in the trenchant ridicule of the Clouds: yet the moral courage of the philosopher made the scoffer quail, and turned the boisterous laugh of fickle Athens, into the hoarse shouts of its rapturous approbation. Truly, the anecdote carries its own confirmation: a man must have had the character of a Socrates, to have behaved with his wise boldness in that crowded theatre. None but the really great can so brave ridicule; none but those whose rule of life is "nil conscire sibi," can so 66 overcome evil with good."

PLATO.

ANOTHER godlike son, O glorious land
Athens, glad mother of a mighty line,

In foremost rank of thine immortal band
Wise, great, and good, unchallenged takes his stand
Plato the master, Plato the divine:

For that, unveil'd before his favoured eyes

Truth's everlasting dawn serenely rose
Glimmering from the windows of the skies,

And gold-bedropping, like the sun on streams,
The river of his rich poetic prose;

Yet clouded much by fancy's misty dreams,
That eloquence an alpine torrent flows,

And thy strong mind, dim with ideal schemes,

Stands a stone mountain crown'd with melting snows.