and discoursing on subjects which no longer can or ought
to concern them. Christians must think your Dialogue of the Dead no
less irreligious than their opponents think mine, and infinitely more
absurd. If indeed you are resolved on this form of composition, there
is no topic which may not, with equal facility, be discussed on
earth; and you may intersperse as much ridicule as you please, without
any fear of censure for inconsistency or irreverence. Hitherto such
writers have confined their view mostly to speculative points,
sophistic reasonings, and sarcastic interpellations.

_Timotheus._ Ha! you are always fond of throwing a little pebble at
the lofty Plato, whom we, on the contrary, are ready to receive (in a
manner) as one of ourselves.

_Lucian._ To throw pebbles is a very uncertain way of showing where
lie defects. Whenever I have mentioned him seriously, I have brought
forward, not accusations, but passages from his writings, such as no
philosopher or scholar or moralist can defend.

_Timotheus._ His doctrines are too abstruse and too sublime for you.

_Lucian._ Solon, Anaxagoras, and Epicurus, are more sublime, if truth
is sublimity.

_Timotheus._ Truth is, indeed; for God is truth.

_Lucian._ We are upon earth to learn what can be learnt upon earth,
and not to speculate on what never can be. This you, O Timotheus, may
call philosophy: to me it appears the idlest of curiosity; for every
other kind may teach us something, and may lead to more beyond. Let
men learn what benefits men; above all things, to contract their
wishes, to calm their passions, and, more especially, to dispel their
fears. Now these are to be dispelled, not by collecting clouds, but by
piercing and scattering them. In the dark we may imagine depths and
heights immeasurable, which, if a torch be carried right before us, we
find it easy to leap across. Much of what we call sublime is only the
residue of infancy, and the worst of it.

The philosophers I quoted are too capacious for schools and systems.
Without noise, without ostentation, without mystery, not quarrelsome,
not captious, not frivolous, their lives were commentaries on their
doctrine. Never evaporating into mist, never stagnating into mire,
their limpid and broad morality runs parallel with the lofty summits
of their genius.

_Timotheus._ Genius! was ever genius like Plato's?

_Lucian._ The most admired of his Dialogues, his _Banquet_, is beset
with such puerilities, def