ormed with such pedantry, and disgraced with
such impurity, that none but the thickest beards, and chiefly of the
philosophers and the satyrs, should bend over it. On a former occasion
he has given us a specimen of history, than which nothing in our
language is worse: here he gives us one of poetry, in honour of Love,
for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his
taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this
dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so
little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been
originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may be
joking: who knows?

_Timotheus._ Forbear! forbear! do not call this notion a silly one:
he took it from our Holy Scriptures, but perverted it somewhat. Woman
was made from man's rib, and did not require to be cut asunder all
the way down: this is no proof of bad reasoning, but merely of
misinterpretation.

_Lucian._ If you would rather have bad reasoning, I will adduce a
little of it. Farther on, he wishes to extol the wisdom of Agathon by
attributing to him such a sentence as this:

'It is evident that Love is the most beautiful of the gods, _because_
he is the youngest of them.'

Now, even on earth, the youngest is not always the most beautiful; how
infinitely less cogent, then, is the argument when we come to speak of
the Immortals, with whom age can have no concern! There was a time
when Vulcan was the youngest of the gods: was he, also, at that time,
and for that reason, the most beautiful? Your philosopher tells us,
moreover, that 'Love is of all deities the most _liquid_; else he
never could fold himself about everything, and flow into and out of
men's souls.'

The three last sentences of Agathon's rhapsody are very harmonious,
and exhibit the finest specimen of Plato's style; but we, accustomed
as we are to hear him lauded for his poetical diction, should hold
that poem a very indifferent one which left on the mind so superficial
an impression. The garden of Academus is flowery without fragrance,
and dazzling without warmth: I am ready to dream away an hour in it
after dinner, but I think it insalutary for a night's repose. So
satisfied was Plato with his _Banquet_, that he says of himself, in
the person of Socrates, 'How can I or any one but find it difficult to
speak after a discourse so eloquent? It would have been wonderful if
the brilliancy of the