German university or a new-fangled National School." Our author makes the slightest account, we dare to say, of the universities of Scotland, where monastic rules and restrictive laws are unknown; and where, according to what we take would be his disparaging meaning of the word, liberal courses of study are at any one's command. And yet, will it be stepping beyond the truth, if we assert that as much of decorum and morality characterizes the conduct of the students in these northern seats of learning, as can be claimed in behalf of his favourites-that as much which is useful, refined, and wholesome is communicated-and that the religion of the clergy bred in the Scottish colleges is as pure and operative as that which may distinguish England among European nations?

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never

The "late Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford" discovers another parallelism besides that which belongs to education and educational institutions, between the present age and that when the Alexandrian Platonism was in vogue, viz., an enormous multiplication of books. Such a multiplication cannot be distinct or separated from an originating, an accompanying, and a consequent taste for reading, for devouring books. He proceeds to lament over and to denounce such an indiscriminate tendency and state of things; but without making anything like what we consider to be a due allowance for the benefits derived. And yet he tells us he would not abolish the printing-press, nor prohibit reading. Then what would he have to be done? Having told us that was a parallel more remarkable than between the literature of Europe in the last 200 years, and that which arose up in Egypt under the patronage of the Ptolemies, to pave the way first for a sceptical philosophy, then for a frivolous physical science, as it is called, and then for pantheism," he proceeds not only to urge upon the Church the necessity for it immediately to examine the whole subject of our popular literature, but to "provide a literature for this country, which, if it cannot expel the present from the market, may at least supply the wants, and prevent the infection of the sounder part of the population." And he adds that some steps to this end have already been taken, and that it is to be hoped they will be followed up. What these steps are we have not seen specified; although he asserts again that the Church "may by great exertions construct a fresh literature less mischievous than the present a new river, instead of the ditch-water of the Thames." For the fumigating of the press, "every book written should be imbued and impregnated with sound principles, both religious and political. Poetry, history, philosophy, travels, novels, reviews, newspapers, grammars, everything should contain in them the great truths which it is required to inculcate on the human mind." A mathematical text-book, we presume, ought to be impregnated with religious and political demonstrations!

It will hardly be objected by any one that every book ought to be imbued with sound principles. But is it in the power of the Church to obliterate the knowledge of the art of printing, which event, we are inclined to believe, Mr. Sewell would not consider a very dire calamity? Books, however, in multitudes we have, and the art, as well as the desire to have them multiplied will never be destroyed. Many of them are pestiferous, and not a few such have been written by churchmen. Nay, at the very moment that we write, Oxford is divided within itself, and a most unseemly contest is waged between its members, its offspring, and its professors. The example is so pernicious, and the enmities so bitter, that we cannot look for much fumigating influence from that quarter for a time to come. In short, we do not think that Mr. Sewell's efforts to establish the parallelisms to which we have so often referred, are at all successful, were it but as regards the number of books and the art of multiplying them in the Alexandrian period as compared with the present. Then, are the past services which the university of Oxford holds out more encouraging? or is the supremacy and monopoly which he would have extended and established over the minds of the community throughout this great empire to be desired? Will the rule of a priesthood be tolerated beyond its present power? Will the strengthening and expansion of the collegiate system bring all men into one sheepfold, and to be of one mind?

But whatever may be thought of the main conclusions to which our author's original purpose, and each part of his work, may have been directed; or however forced, exaggerated, and ultra his principles and argument, it must be conceded that there is much in his pages which is masterly and satisfactory. His disquisitions concerning the different sects of Grecian philosophers, particular doctrines, and celebrated individuals, are often excellent, displaying an acute perception of their characteristics. Political and literary notices, as well as those of a philosophical and religious nature, abound in the volume. But the grand feature of the whole is, of course, his manner of treatment as regards Plato, embracing views of his character in every capacity, and discussions especially relative to the plan, the arrangement, the doctrines, and the object of his writings and philosophizings. As a specimen of his commentary on the Dialogues we quote part of that which the Phædrus obtains, which he considers entitled to precedence, not only on account of chronological date, but of other circumstances, some of which are thus explained:

There is also another reason why the Phædrus is the first Dialogue which claims attention. It is the most striking of them all, most singular, at the first view, most incoherent, most strongly marked with the peculiar character of Plato's thoughts and style of composition, most perplexing in its structure, and at the same time most startling in its ethical tone. In a

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rhetorical point of view, in which men have too long accustomed to lose sight of Plato's philosophy, the Phædrus has evidently been the sample, on which philologists have justified their animadversions. Laertius censures it as puerile, μpakides; Dicæarchus as vulgarly extravagant; Olympiodorus as dithyrambic. Plutarch ridicules its description of landscape scenery; Hermeas repeats the criticism of his day upon it, as coarse, inflated, bombastic and artificial;" Longinus alludes to similar censures on the "wild extravagant diction, harsh metaphors, and forced allegories" imputed generally to Plato, but which are scarcely to be found except in the Phædrus; Dionysius of Halicarnassus hints at the same errors of Plato's style" wherever his philosophy carries him into subjects of a lofty and supernatural character." And every one who fails to see the real drift of the composition, notwithstanding all his prejudices in favour of the "Attic Homer, ," "the master of Demosthenes," the man whose language would be the language of Jupiter, if Jupiter spoke Greek, will rise from it with a similar impression of turgidness and ostentatious pretension.

He will rise with another impression also, of a far more painful and perplexing nature: and it is to be hoped that he will. The Phædrus, more than any other relic of ancient literature, more even than the Comedies of Aristophanes, tears aside the veil which taste, and poetry, and learning, and ignorance of history in many men, and the cant of liberty in still more, have combined to throw over the hideous deformities of Athenian life. It lays bare scenes and things, which, shocking as they are, we are yet bade by God's own word to look upon at times, that we may learn to hate them. And it is no slight lesson to find them, where inexperienced human fancy is most inclined to imagine perfection, in the midst of unbounded freedom, and philosophy, and refinement, and all the other vanities, on which man's reason prides itself, and which become vanities the moment they are let loose from the control of faith and self-denial. Addison tells the story of a father, who crushed in his son the first seeds of passion and sin by taking him round to their haunts, and laying open to him at once the whole mystery of iniquity. Something of the same kind was undoubtedly contemplated by Plato in the composition of his Phædrus. And benefit may be derived from it to Christians, if it merely exhibit a picture of the miserable state of heathenism, even in the most intellectual portion of the most intellectual age of the most intellectual people in the ancient world.

The younger reader will also find in this Dialogue another difficulty, which has perplexed all commentators alike. Where is the unity and regularity of structure, which we should expect from the acknowledged skill of Plato in giving form to his writings, and which on minute examination is so obvious, that Schleiermacher has not hesitated to take it as one of the leading clues to their right arrangement? At first sight, the Dialogue splits into two parts, the former on the nature of Love, and the latter on Rhetoric. And such a binary structure is very common in Plato's writings. It occurs in the Gorgias, which commences with Rhetoric, and ends with Justice; in the Republic, which introduces into the midst of a discussion on Justice (and that too merely as an illustration) a theory of a social system, which occupies more than three-fourths of the work; in the Sophist, which throws in an inquiry into the nature of abstract being as a paren

thesis to a humorous caricature of the Sophist's profession; in the Protagoras, where the conversation diverges from its ethical subject to a criticism on poetry; and in the Philebus, which by the same marsupian structure carries a metaphysical analysis of unity and plurality in the pouch of a treatise upon pleasure. It is evident, from many observations thrown out by Plato himself on the occasion of these digressions, that they are not accidental, but intentional. These seemingly strange and heterogeneous juxtapositions are not to be regarded, as if a careless flow of conversation had forced its own way without thought, taking up everything which happened to lie in its bed-pebbles, and twigs, and insects, and clay, and hardening them together into one concretion-but they are evidently designed for various purposes. In many instances the one subject is not merely inclosed, but enwombed in the other; is connected with it, that is, by a vital link of thought; is born from it; and very often left almost an embryo in one dialogue to be taken up and fully developed in another. Thus, even to the most careless observer, the commencement of the Phædrus leads on to the Lysis, and the Lysis to the Convivium. The latter part again carries on, as it were, a propagation of subject from itself to the Gorgias, and the Gorgias another to the Republic. In other cases a totally distinct vein of thought is thrown up to dislocate a train of inquiry, just as in geological language beds of rock are interrupted by faults. And on such occasions there is a playful apologetic irony accompanying the process, just such as we might imagine would play upon the face of nature, if she amused herself with thus perplexing the labours of the miner, in order to try his patience, and give scope for ingenuity. Still more frequently, especially in the Sophist, the Republic, and the Phædrus, the two subjects are connected by a chain, which can only be traced clearly in the accidental circumstances of the day. They are as two buoys floating side by side, and the cable which ties them together has disappeared under the water, and can only be recovered by diving somewhat deeply into the history of opinions and practices which are now lost to sight.

Mention having been made of Aristophanes in our extract, we quote a paragraph which is devoted to the prince of Athenian comic. writers, who is compared with Plato:

One, therefore, of the best preparations, which may be recommended to the student, is an accurate and thoughtful examination of a class of works very different from those of Plato in their outward form, but very similar in their aim and spirit, the Comedies of Aristophanes, and especially the Clouds. Men smile when they hear the anecdote of one of the most venerable Fathers of the Church, who never went to bed without Aristophanes under his pillow. But the noble tone of morals, the elevated taste, the sound political wisdom, the boldness and acuteness of the satire, the grand object, which is seen throughout, of correcting the follies of the day, and improving the condition of his country-all these are features in Aristophanes, which, however disguised, as they intentionally are, by coarseness and buffoonery, entitle him to the highest respect from every reader of antiquity. He condescended, indeed, to play the part of jester to the

Athenian tyrants. But his jests were the vehicles for telling to them the soundest truths. They were never without a far higher aim than to raise a momentary laugh. He was no farce writer, but a deep philosophical politician grieved and ashamed at the condition of his country, and through the stage, the favourite amusement of Athenians, aiding to carry on the one great common work, which Plato proposed in his Dialogues, and in which all the better and nobler spirits of the time seem to have concurred as by a confederacy-the reformation of an atrocious democracy. There is as much system in the Comedies of Aristophanes as in the Dialogues of Plato. Every part of a vitiated public mind is exposed in its turn. Its demagogues in the Knights, its courts of justice in the Wasps, its foreign policy in the Acharnians, its tyranny over the allies in the Birds, the state of female society in the Lysistrate and the Ecclesiazusæ, and its corrupt poetical taste in the Frogs. No one play is without its definite object and the state of national education, as the greatest cause of all, is laid open in the Clouds. Whatever light is thrown, by that admirable play, upon the character of Socrates, and the position which he occupies in the Platonic Dialogues-a point, it may be remarked, on which the greatest mistakes are daily made-it is chiefly valuable as exhibiting, in a short but very complete analysis, and by a number of fine Rembrandtlike strokes, not any of which must be overlooked, all the features of that frightful school of sophistry, which at that time was engaged systematically in corrupting the Athenian youth, and against which the whole battery of Plato was pointedly directed.

ART. VI.-1. Hardness; or, the Uncle. 3 vols.

Saunders and Otley.

2. The Mirza. By JAMES MORIER, Esq. 3 vols. Bentley. THE season is prolific as usual of lightsome reading for the winter quarter. But what season is not? Young ladies and old gentlemen have such a notion in these book-making days that nothing is so simple and easy as to put upon paper their fancies romantic! and every little body says,-Oh! if the world knew my history it would read better than a novel! So full is every one of its little self. But to write a novel-a good, a readable novel-is not such a simple and easy matter as striplings and ignoramuses may imagine; and without telling our friends at present what is requisite, and what will accomplish their purpose, we go on to state that the author of "Hardness," be he an old stager, or a young adventurer, has made a hit. Why, sir, the wide world is so completely within your grasp, you have such a simple, natural, and powerful way with you, that there is hardly a chapter in your book that does not furnish a character, suggest passages of life, or indicate-perhaps express sentiments, which common fictionists would think themselves blessed in having to work out into three volumes. Your "Uncle" is full to cramming of suggestiveness, let alone completeness in itself.

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