Grecian education, which is thus introduced: The first of the dramatic pieces of Aristophanes seems to have been directed against the state of private manners in Athens; in his Acharnians 'he endeavoured to moderate the insolence of national success, and to infuse juster notions respecting a great public measure, which 6 was putting the existence of the Athenians as a people at stake; 'while in the Knights, or, as it may more properly be termed, the 'Demagogues, a mirror was held up to his fellow-citizens, where the ruler and the ruled saw themselves reflected with equal fidelity, ' and by which posterity has gained a complete knowledge of the greatest historical phenomenon that ever appeared, the Athenian 'Demus. It remained for the author to strike at the root of all these evils, private and public, domestic and political,-a mischievous and most pernicious system of Education. This was undoubt • ly the origin and object of the Clouds; and a brief outline of the progress of knowledge among the Greeks, and more particularly of that branch of it, which was comprehended under the name of "Philosophy," will at once tend to explain the aim of the author, and throw some light upon the comedy itself. '-He accordingly traces the Athenian Pupil through the hands of the Grammarian (yeauμarins) who taught him Homer, with all his own criticisms, commentaries, explanations, and interpolations, upon that great Text book of his instructions,-into those of the teacher of Music (ags), who continued to cultivate the imagination at the expense of the understanding,-of the master of the Gymnasium, where he was exposed to learn something worse than the mere exercises of the Palæstra, *-and lastly of the Sophist, whose sole object-besides the acquisition of fame and of money -seems to have been to fit his disciple for the ruin of his country, and the utter destruction of his own character. Mr Mitchell's strong and masterly delineation of these insidious pseudophilosophers is well worthy of a little attention.

Protagoras of Abdera, the great Belial' of the Sophists, and the first person who acquired distinction in this profession, culled by the hand of Democritus from the obscurity of his original trade, and planted on a fatal elevation by the instructions of that philosopher, and the aid of his own talents, became the UPAS of society, which was to spread far and wide its deadly branches, and drop a mortal poison upon all that came beneath its shade. He was the first to announce, that' with him might be acquired, for a proper compensation, that species of knowledge, which was able to confound right and wrong, and make the worse appear the better cause. He and his followers in the same School openly inculcated, that not only what is whole

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Vide Aristophanem in Pace. v. 762. in Vespis. v. 1025,

⚫ some and useful had no actual substance in themselves; but that honour and virtue, being the beginning and aim of what is useful, existed only in the opinions and habits of men: that the first and best of all acquisitions was Eloquence, such as in the senate, the ecclesia, the courts of law, and the common in'tercourse of society, could steal, like the songs by which serpents were charmed, upon the ears of their auditors, and sway their minds at the will of the speaker: that, on all occasions, might makes right: that the property of the weak belongs to the strong, and that, whatever the law might say to the contrary, the voice of nature taught and justified the doctrine: that luxury, intemperance, licentiousness, were alone virtue and happiness: that the greatest of blessings was the power of committing wrong with impunity, and the greatest of evils the inability to revenge an injury received. Such were some of the doctrines," says Mr Mitchell, which, advanced with all the powers of dialectic skill, and dropping upon a soil too well fitted by an imperfect education for their reception, con• fused the intellects, and perverted the notions of the young Athenians.' Their passion for disputation upon all subjects is described by Plato as something beyond the reach of decay

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or mortality. No sooner,' he says, does one of our young men get a taste of it, than he feels delighted, as if he had dis• covered a treasure of wisdom. Carried away by a pleasure ⚫ that amounts to madness, he finds a subject of dispute in every thing that occurs. At one time both sides of the subject are 'considered and reduced to one. At another, the subject is analyzed and split into parts: himself becomes the first and principal victim of his own doubts and difficulties: his neighbour, whether junior, senior, or equal, no matter, is the next sufferer; he spares not father nor mother, nor any one who will give him the loan of his ears; scarcely animals escape him, and much less his fellow-creatures; even the foreigner has no security but the want of an interpreter at hand to go between them.'+ We may imagine how rejoiced youths of

* We remember the opening of a lawyer's speech upon the Circuit, which may give an idea of the sophistical phraseology and mode of reasoning: My Lord, if there ever was a case, in which one case ought to be conjoined with another case, this case is that case! Which case, Mr ***?'-was his Lordship's gruff but humorous reply.

+ Philebus, p. 74.-Gil Blas, describing his own disputatious propensities, while a student at Oviedo, draws a similar picture: I was so much in love with dispute, that I stopped passengers, known, or

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this disposition would be to fall in the way of instructors who, as Plato describes them in the Phædon, when they were discussing any question, cared not how the subject they were treating really stood,-but only considered how the positions they themselves laid down might be made appear true to the bystanders.' And again, in the Theatetus- It is as easy to talk with madmen as it is with them. Their writings have nothing steady in them: all are in a state of perpetual motion. As for a pause in disputation and interrogation, or a quiet question or answer, it is a chance infinitely less than nothing that you get such a thing from them. For their minds are in a perpetual state of restlessness: and woe to him that puts an interrogative! instantly comes a flight of enigmatical little words, like arrows from a quiver; and if you ask a reason of this assault, the result is another discharge, with merely a change of names.' ||

Accordingly Protagoras found his new trade more profitable than binding faggots. Incited by his success, a numerous train of adventurers still more flagitious flocked to Athens, and taught the same maxims in terms yet more open. -Knowledge is Power, says Lord Bacon: Knowledge is Gold, said the Sophists,-and they brought their wits to a good market for substantiating the boast. Like the admirable Crichton, and other charlatans of the middle ages, who were accustomed to set up challenges, offering to dispute de omni scibili,-they professed themselves ready to answer every question, and to teach every branch of knowledge. The effect of such tuition upon the manners and the morals of Athenian

' unknown, and proposed arguments to them; and sometimes meeting with Hibernian geniuses, who were very glad of the occasion, it good jest to see us dispute: by our extravagant gestures, grimace, contortions, our eyes full of fary, and our mouths full of foam, one would have taken us for bedlamites rather than philoso< phers. Vol. I. p. 3.

In Phædone, § 40. Ed. Oxon.

In Theæteto, p. 130. The process of ratiocination taught by Raimond Lully, as it is described by his follower Cornelius Agrippa, strongly reminds us of the Grecian Sophists. By this art, says he, everye man might plentifullye dispute of what matter he wolde, and with a certain artificial and huge heap of nownes and verbes invente and dispute with ostentation, full of trifling deceites upon both sides. (Corn. Agrip. of the Vanity of Sciences, Englished by Ja. San. Gent. Lond. 1575.) It is this mechanical process which Swift ridicules by his machine in the academy of Lagado.-Scott's Life of Swift, p. 334.

society we may easily conjecture. Plato and Aristophanes bear ample testimony to the perversion of manners in both the upper and the lower classes: and the impartial pen of Thucydides has left upon record a deterioration of morals not only in Athens, but throughout Greece, adequate, and yet not more than adequate, to the causes which were thus set at work to produce it. * A baneful and malignant vapour was spreading abroad beneath the surface; and drooping flowers and withered verdure upon every side gave tokens of its desolating course.

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To dispel by the powerful weapon of ridicule these mists of error,-to give a finished picture of a plain unlettered man as he was likely to come from the hands of the Sophists,-to res6 cue the young men of family from the hands of such flagitious preceptors, and restore them to that noble simplicity of manners, which had prevailed in Greece in the time of Homer, and which had not entirely disappeared even in the days of Herodotus, was unquestionably the object of the Clouds.' The object was laudable-was noble--and the manner in which it was attempted does as much credit to the heart and understanding, as it does to the inventive genius and poetic powers of Aristophanes. How the attempt was made-the plot and plan of the memorable drama, on which the Poet bestowed the whole force of his consummate skill-must, from the writings of Cumberland, be well known to the generality of readers. It is not our purpose to linger upon this part of the subject: we have a proposition to make out, from which Mr Mitchell's courage has shrunk, though he has collected such ample matter for supporting it: and, despite that halo of glory, which virtues and intellect that form an epoch in the history of man' have thrown around the son of Sophroniscus, we can see enough to believe that Aristophanes was as happy in selecting the central figure for his piece, as he was in the other constituent parts of this his greatest production. We certainly should not be content to rest the defence of the comic bard upon either of the lame and impotent conclusions to which all Mr M.'s reasoning conducts him; namely--either that the parties were very little known to each other,' and that Aristophanes wrote rather in ignorance than with any intention of exposing those faults in Socrates, which his personal virtues and magnanimity made only the more dangerous, or that he described Socrates only as he was at the time, or such as he conceived him to be,—a conjecture that Mr M. has the flagrant inconsisten

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* See the Account of the Corcyræan Sedition: Thucyd. Book 3. c. 188.

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cy to urge in the face of his own argument that every single trait of the Aristophanic Socrates may be traced in the Platonic'—a picture drawn from the most intimate knowledge more than twenty years after the Clouds had been acted, and limned in such favourable colours as the very safety of the artist made it necessary should be employed. {|

We know from the various authorities upon the Life and Conversation of Socrates, that have come down to us, that he was the immediate disciple of Archelaus, one of the Ionian school, and thus derived his philosophical descent regularly from Thales, of whose disciples it is with truth affirmed

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Their facts were few, but their disputes were long; if they could not convince, they could at least reason: one absurdity led them to another; but every absurdity furnished a disputation of words, and words, even without ideas, were as the breath of life to the loquacious Athenians.' We have himself, or Plato for him, laying down a fundamental principle, that the wicked man sins only through ignorance, and that the end of his actions, like that of all other men, is good, but that he mistakes the na•ture of it, and uses wrong means to attain it, '—and in the same way, defining a virtue like bravery to be nothing but knowledge. We have him described as one who, if not a Sophist himself, was always in the company of Sophists, '-who like them had given himself up deeply and unremittedly to physical researches, '-and who in vanity and self-conceit 6 surpassed them all.' We find him spending his time not only with such ambitious and unprincipled young men as Alcibiades and Critias, who left him as soon as they had gained their objects-a power of speaking and an aptitude for action, ‡ upon principles which, it is very plain, notwithstanding the example of Socrates himself, might lead to any thing but patriotism and moral excellence,-but with an Eucleid, an Antisthenes, an Aristippus, men who, as Mr Mitchell expresses it, went from him to form schools, whose names have since been synonymous with sophistry, the coarsest effrontery, and the most undisguised voluptuousness. The noble stand he made for the laws of his country, in the famous case of the ten generals, *

Preliminary Discourse, p. cxxxii.

Vid. Aristot. Ethic. Lib. III. c. viii. et Platonem in Lachete et Protagora.

Η γενεσθαι ἂν ἱκανωτάτω λέγειν τε και πραττειν. Xen. Memor. Lib. I. op ii. § 15.

Xen. Hist. Græc. Lib. I. c. 7.

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