ces are often too large for the place they occupy. If
a water-melon is not to be placed in an oyster-shell, neither is a
grain of millet in a golden salver. At high festivals a full band may
enter: ordinary conversation goes on better without it.

_Timotheus._ There is something so spiritual about him, that many of
us Christians are firmly of opinion he must have been partially
enlightened from above.

_Lucian._ I hope and believe we all are. His entire works are in our
library. Do me the favour to point out to me a few of those passages
where in poetry he approaches the spirit of Aristophanes, or where in
morals he comes up to Epictetus.

_Timotheus._ It is useless to attempt it if you carry your prejudices
with you. Beside, my dear cousin, I would not offend you, but really
your mind has no point about it which could be brought to contact or
affinity with Plato's.

_Lucian._ In the universality of his genius there must surely be some
atom coincident with another in mine. You acknowledge, as everybody
must do, that his wit is the heaviest and lowest: pray, is the
specimen he has given us of history at all better?

_Timotheus._ I would rather look to the loftiness of his mind, and the
genius that sustains him.

_Lucian._ So would I. Magnificent words, and the pomp and procession
of stately sentences, may accompany genius, but are not always nor
frequently called out by it. The voice ought not to be perpetually nor
much elevated in the ethic and didactic, nor to roll sonorously, as if
it issued from a mask in the theatre. The horses in the plain under
Troy are not always kicking and neighing; nor is the dust always
raised in whirlwinds on the banks of Simois and Scamander; nor are the
rampires always in a blaze. Hector has lowered his helmet to the
infant of Andromache, and Achilles to the embraces of Briseis. I do
not blame the prose-writer who opens his bosom occasionally to a
breath of poetry; neither, on the contrary, can I praise the gait of
that pedestrian who lifts up his legs as high on a bare heath as in a
cornfield. Be authority as old and obstinate as it may, never let it
persuade you that a man is the stronger for being unable to keep
himself on the ground, or the weaker for breathing quietly and softly
on ordinary occasions. Tell me, over and over, that you find every
great quality in Plato: let me only once ask you in return, whether he
ever is ardent and energetic, whether he wins the affections, wh