end who was expected by them
to train their son in manly exercises and in virtue. It is not likely
that a Greek parent committed him to a lover, any more than we should
to a schoolmaster, in the expectation that he would be corrupted by him,
but rather in the hope that his morals would be better cared for than
was possible in a great household of slaves.

It is difficult to adduce the authority of Plato either for or against
such practices or customs, because it is not always easy to determine
whether he is speaking of 'the heavenly and philosophical love, or
of the coarse Polyhymnia:' and he often refers to this (e.g. in the
Symposium) half in jest, yet 'with a certain degree of seriousness.'
We observe that they entered into one part of Greek literature, but not
into another, and that the larger part is free from such associations.
Indecency was an element of the ludicrous in the old Greek Comedy, as
it has been in other ages and countries. But effeminate love was always
condemned as well as ridiculed by the Comic poets; and in the New Comedy
the allusions to such topics have disappeared. They seem to have been no
longer tolerated by the greater refinement of the age. False sentiment
is found in the Lyric and Elegiac poets; and in mythology 'the greatest
of the Gods' (Rep.) is not exempt from evil imputations. But the morals
of a nation are not to be judged of wholly by its literature. Hellas
was not necessarily more corrupted in the days of the Persian and
Peloponnesian wars, or of Plato and the Orators, than England in the
time of Fielding and Smollett, or France in the nineteenth century. No
one supposes certain French novels to be a representation of ordinary
French life. And the greater part of Greek literature, beginning
with Homer and including the tragedians, philosophers, and, with the
exception of the Comic poets (whose business was to raise a laugh
by whatever means), all the greater writers of Hellas who have been
preserved to us, are free from the taint of indecency.

Some general considerations occur to our mind when we begin to reflect
on this subject. (1) That good and evil are linked together in human
nature, and have often existed side by side in the world and in man to
an extent hardly credible. We cannot distinguish them, and are therefore
unable to part them; as in the parable 'they grow together unto the
harvest:' it is only a rule of external decency by which society can
divide them. Nor should