and especially on the right education of youth,
"for," says he, "many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the
victors; but education is never suicidal." By education he explains
himself to mean--

"That education in virtue from youth upwards which makes a man eagerly
pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how
rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which,
upon our view, deserves the name; and that other sort of training
which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere
cleverness apart from intelligence and justice is mean and illiberal,
and is not worthy to be called education at all."

Plato wrote this dialogue when over seventy, an age which for many years
(if I live) I shall be able to contemplate as respectable. Yet, though
speaking at a guess, I say pretty confidently that the talk of these three
imaginary interlocutors of his upon youth, and the feeling that colours
it, convey more of the truth about old age than does Cicero's admired
treatise on that subject or any of its descendants. For these treatises
start with the false postulate that age is concerned about itself, whereas
it is the mark of age to be indifferent about itself, and this mark of
indifference deepens with the years. Nor did Cicero once in his _De
Senectute_ get hold of so fine or so true a thought as Plato's Athenian
lets fall almost casually--that a man should honour an aged parent as he
would the image of a God treasured up and dwelling in his house.

The outlook of Plato's three elderly men, in fact, differs little, if at
all, from Mr Meredith's as you may see for yourself by turning back to the
September chapter and reading the part from "Not long ago an interviewer
called on Mr. Meredith," through to the excerpt from 'Lucifer in
Starlight'. Speaking as a parent, I say that this outlook is--I won't say
the right one, though this too I believe--the outlook a man _naturally_
takes as he grows older: naturally, because it is natural for a man to
have children, and he who has none may find alleviations, but must miss
the course of nature. As I write there comes back to me the cry of my old
schoolmaster, T. E. Brown, protesting from the grave--

"But when I think if we must part
And all this personal dream be fled--
O, then my heart! O, then my useless heart!
Would God that thou wert dead--
A clod insensi