of his edicts.

_Timotheus._ We have what is all-sufficient.

_Lucian._ I see you have.

_Timotheus._ You have ridiculed all religion and all philosophy.

_Lucian._ I have found but little of either. I have cracked many a
nut, and have come only to dust or maggots.

_Timotheus._ To say nothing of the saints, are all philosophers fools
or impostors? And, because you cannot rise to the ethereal heights of
Plato, nor comprehend the real magnitude of a man so much above you,
must he be a dwarf?

_Lucian._ The best sight is not that which sees best in the dark or
the twilight; for no objects are then visible in their true colours,
and just proportions; but it is that which presents to us things as
they are, and indicates what is within our reach and what is beyond
it. Never were any three writers, of high celebrity, so little
understood in the main character, as Plato, Diogenes, and Epicurus.
Plato is a perfect master of logic and rhetoric; and whenever he errs
in either, as I have proved to you he does occasionally, he errs
through perverseness, not through unwariness. His language often
settles into clear and most beautiful prose, often takes an imperfect
and incoherent shape of poetry, and often, cloud against cloud, bursts
with a vehement detonation in the air. Diogenes was hated both by the
vulgar and the philosophers. By the philosophers, because he exposed
their ignorance, ridiculed their jealousies, and rebuked their pride:
by the vulgar, because they never can endure a man apparently of their
own class who avoids their society and partakes in none of their
humours, prejudices, and animosities. What right has he to be greater
or better than they are? he who wears older clothes, who eats staler
fish, and possesses no vote to imprison or banish anybody. I am now
ashamed that I mingled in the rabble, and that I could not resist the
childish mischief of smoking him in his tub. He was the wisest man of
his time, not excepting Aristoteles; for he knew that he was greater
than Philip or Alexander. Aristoteles did not know that he himself
was, or knowing it, did not act up to his knowledge; and here is a
deficiency of wisdom.

_Timotheus._ Whether you did or did not strike the cask, Diogenes
would have closed his eyes equally. He would never have come forth and
seen the truth, had it shone upon the world in that day. But,
intractable as was this recluse, Epicurus, I fear, is quite as
lamentable. What horrible doctr