ile the other, Laelius,
supports the opposite thesis. His views of language and number are
derived from Plato; like him he denounces the drama. He also declares
that if his life were to be twice as long he would have no time to read
the lyric poets. The picture of democracy is translated by him word for
word, though he had hardly shown himself able to 'carry the jest' of
Plato. He converts into a stately sentence the humorous fancy about the
animals, who 'are so imbued with the spirit of democracy that they make
the passers-by get out of their way.' His description of the tyrant is
imitated from Plato, but is far inferior. The second book is historical,
and claims for the Roman constitution (which is to him the ideal) a
foundation of fact such as Plato probably intended to have given to the
Republic in the Critias. His most remarkable imitation of Plato is the
adaptation of the vision of Er, which is converted by Cicero into the
'Somnium Scipionis'; he has 'romanized' the myth of the Republic, adding
an argument for the immortality of the soul taken from the Phaedrus,
and some other touches derived from the Phaedo and the Timaeus. Though a
beautiful tale and containing splendid passages, the 'Somnium Scipionis;
is very inferior to the vision of Er; it is only a dream, and hardly
allows the reader to suppose that the writer believes in his own
creation. Whether his dialogues were framed on the model of the lost
dialogues of Aristotle, as he himself tells us, or of Plato, to which
they bear many superficial resemblances, he is still the Roman orator;
he is not conversing, but making speeches, and is never able to mould
the intractable Latin to the grace and ease of the Greek Platonic
dialogue. But if he is defective in form, much more is he inferior to
the Greek in matter; he nowhere in his philosophical writings leaves
upon our minds the impression of an original thinker.

Plato's Republic has been said to be a church and not a state; and such
an ideal of a city in the heavens has always hovered over the Christian
world, and is embodied in St. Augustine's 'De Civitate Dei,' which is
suggested by the decay and fall of the Roman Empire, much in the same
manner in which we may imagine the Republic of Plato to have been
influenced by the decline of Greek politics in the writer's own age. The
difference is that in the time of Plato the degeneracy, though certain,
was gradual and insensible: whereas the taking of Rome by the Go