the Alexandrian school, without knowing any thing of
the source whence those streams are derived? Or was it because some heavy
German critic, who knew nothing beyond a verb in mi, presumed to grunt at
these venerable heroes? Whatever was its source, and whenever it
originated, for I have not been able to discover either, this however is
certain, that it owes its being to the most profound Ignorance, or the
most artful Sophistry, and that its origin is no less contemptible than
obscure. For let us but for a moment consider the advantages which these
latter Platonists possessed beyond any of their modern revilers. In the
first place, they had the felicity of having the Greek for their native
language, and must therefore, as they were confessedly, learned men, have
understood that language incomparably better than any man since the time
in which the ancient Greek was a living tongue. In the next place, they
had books to consult, written by the immediate disciples of Plato, which
have been lost for upwards of a thousand years, besides many Pythagoric
writings from which Plato himself derived most of his more sublime
dogmas. Hence we find the works of Parmenides, Empedocles, the Electic
Zeno, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and many other illustrious philosophers of
the highest antiquity, who were either genuine Platonists or the sources
of Platonism, are continually cited by these most excellent interpreters,
and in the third place they united the greatest purity of life to the
most piercing vigor of intellect. Now when it is considered that the
philosophy to the study of which these great men devoted their lives, was
professedly delivered by its author in obscurity; that Aristotle himself
studied it for twenty years; and that it was no uncommon thing, as Plato
informs us in one of his Epistles, to find students unable to comprehend
its sublimest tenets even in a longer period than this,--when all these
circumstances are considered, what must we think of the arrogance, not to
say impudence, of men in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries, who have dared to calumniate these great masters of wisdom? Of
men, with whom the Greek is no native language; who have no such books to
consult as those had whom they revile; who have never thought, even in a
dream, of making the acquisition of wisdom the great object of their
life; and who in short have committed that most baneful error of
mistaking philology for philosophy, and wo