effort has been made to suck Sir T. R. back into
Scotland!

Thus, it is too difficult without a motive to hold apart vast distances
_or_ intervals that lie in a field which has all gathered into a blue
haze. Stars, divided by millions of miles, collapse into each other. So
_mythi_: and then comes the perplexity--the entanglement. Then come
also, from lacunae arising in these interwelded stories, temptations to
falsehood. By the way, even the recent tale of Astyages seems to have
been pieced: the difficulty was to find a motive for Cyrus, reputed a
good man, to make war on his grandfather. Kill him he might by accident.
But the dream required that he should dethrone his grandfather.
Accordingly the dreadful story is devised; but why should Cyrus adopt
the injuries of a nobleman who, if all were true, had only saved himself
by accident?

Impossible as it would seem to transmute Socrates into a _mythus_,
considering the broad daylight which then rested upon Athenian history,
and the inextricable way in which Socrates is entangled in that history
(although we have all seen many a Scriptural personage so transmuted
under far less colourable pretenses or advantages), still it is evident
that the mediaeval schoolmen _did_ practically treat Socrates as
something of that sort--as a mythical, symbolic, or representative man.
Socrates is the eternal burthen of their quillets, quodlibets, problems,
syllogisms; for them he is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, that
much-suffering man; or, to speak more adequately, for _them_ he is the
John Doe and the Richard Roe of English law, whose feuds have tormented
the earth and incensed the heavens through a cycle of uncounted
centuries, and must have given a bad character of our planet on its
English side. To such an extent was this pushed, that many of the
scholastic writers became wearied of enunciating or writing his name,
and, anticipating the occasional fashion of _My lud_ and _Your ludship_
at our English Bar, or of _Hocus Pocus_ as an abbreviation of pure
weariness for _Hoc est Corpus_, they called him not _Socrates_, but
_Sortes_. Now, whence, let me ask, was this custom derived? As to Doe
and Roe, who or what first set them by the ears together is now probably
past all discovery. But as to _Sortes_, that he was a mere contraction
for _Socrates_ is proved in the same way that _Mob_ is shown to have
been a brief way of writing _Mobile vulgus_, viz., that by Bishop
Stillingfleet in particu