country, and through the stage, the favorite
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 Sysistrate and the
Ecclesiazusae, 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 Rembrandt-like
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.

PLATO.

Plato was born in the year 429 B.C., and died when he was eighty-two
years old, on his birthday. He was a pupil of Socrates, the first and
purest of moral philosophers. By the rare union of a brilliant
imagination with a fondness for severe mathematical studies and
profound metaphysical investigations; by extensive foreign travel; by
familiar intercourse with the most enlightened men of his time,
particularly Socrates, whose instructive conversations he attended for
eight years, as well as by the correspondence which he maintained with
the Pythagoreans of Magna Graecia, this great philosopher came to
surpass all others in the vastness and profoundness of his views, and
in the correctness and eloquence with which he expressed them; while
his pure moral character entitled him to take his place by the side of
Socrates. Socrates once said, "For what higher reward could a teacher
ask than to have such pupils as Xenophon and Plato?"

The object of Plato was evidently the noble one of placing before man
a