such as the comparison of the Athenian empire to the empire of Darius,
which show a spirit very different from that of Plato; and mistakes of
fact, as e.g. about the Thirty Tyrants, whom the writer of the letters
seems to have confused with certain inferior magistrates, making them
in all fifty-one. These palpable errors and absurdities are absolutely
irreconcilable with their genuineness. And as they appear to have a
common parentage, the more they are studied, the more they will be found
to furnish evidence against themselves. The Seventh, which is thought to
be the most important of these Epistles, has affinities with the Third
and the Eighth, and is quite as impossible and inconsistent as the rest.
It is therefore involved in the same condemnation.--The final conclusion
is that neither the Seventh nor any other of them, when carefully
analyzed, can be imagined to have proceeded from the hand or mind of
Plato. The other testimonies to the voyages of Plato to Sicily and the
court of Dionysius are all of them later by several centuries than the
events to which they refer. No extant writer mentions them older
than Cicero and Cornelius Nepos. It does not seem impossible that so
attractive a theme as the meeting of a philosopher and a tyrant, once
imagined by the genius of a Sophist, may have passed into a romance
which became famous in Hellas and the world. It may have created one of
the mists of history, like the Trojan war or the legend of Arthur, which
we are unable to penetrate. In the age of Cicero, and still more in
that of Diogenes Laertius and Appuleius, many other legends had gathered
around the personality of Plato,--more voyages, more journeys to visit
tyrants and Pythagorean philosophers. But if, as we agree with Karsten
in supposing, they are the forgery of some rhetorician or sophist, we
cannot agree with him in also supposing that they are of any historical
value, the rather as there is no early independent testimony by which
they are supported or with which they can be compared.

IV. There is another subject to which I must briefly call attention,
lest I should seem to have overlooked it. Dr. Henry Jackson, of Trinity
College, Cambridge, in a series of articles which he has contributed to
the Journal of Philology, has put forward an entirely new explanation of
the Platonic 'Ideas.' He supposes that in the mind of Plato they took,
at different times in his life, two essentially different forms:--an
earlie