s not forced upon it from without. When
planted in a congenial soil the little seed becomes a tree, and 'the
birds of the air build their nests in the branches.' There is an echo
of this in the prayer at the end of the Dialogue, 'Give me beauty in
the inward soul, and may the inward and outward man be at one.' We may
further compare the words of St. Paul, 'Written not on tables of stone,
but on fleshly tables of the heart;' and again, 'Ye are my epistles
known and read of all men.' There may be a use in writing as a
preservative against the forgetfulness of old age, but to live is higher
far, to be ourselves the book, or the epistle, the truth embodied in a
person, the Word made flesh. Something like this we may believe to have
passed before Plato's mind when he affirmed that speech was superior to
writing. So in other ages, weary of literature and criticism, of making
many books, of writing articles in reviews, some have desired to live
more closely in communion with their fellow-men, to speak heart to
heart, to speak and act only, and not to write, following the example of
Socrates and of Christ...

Some other touches of inimitable grace and art and of the deepest wisdom
may be also noted; such as the prayer or 'collect' which has just been
cited, 'Give me beauty,' etc.; or 'the great name which belongs to God
alone;' or 'the saying of wiser men than ourselves that a man of sense
should try to please not his fellow-servants, but his good and noble
masters,' like St. Paul again; or the description of the 'heavenly
originals'...

The chief criteria for determining the date of the Dialogue are (1) the
ages of Lysias and Isocrates; (2) the character of the work.

Lysias was born in the year 458; Isocrates in the year 436, about seven
years before the birth of Plato. The first of the two great rhetoricians
is described as in the zenith of his fame; the second is still young and
full of promise. Now it is argued that this must have been written in
the youth of Isocrates, when the promise was not yet fulfilled. And thus
we should have to assign the Dialogue to a year not later than 406,
when Isocrates was thirty and Plato twenty-three years of age, and while
Socrates himself was still alive.

Those who argue in this way seem not to reflect how easily Plato
can 'invent Egyptians or anything else,' and how careless he is of
historical truth or probability. Who would suspect that the wise
Critias, the virtuous Charmides, ha