Plato have marred the effect of his works on his immediate public, which had not yet forgotten the character of Socrates, if the part which Socrates plays there stood in direct con- tradiction with the image which his real life had left in the reader's mind? And if we believe Xenophon, and in this respect we cannot doubt the accuracy of the contemporary apologist, that Socrates spent the whole of his time in public places, and suppose that he was always engaged in discourses which, though they may have been more beautiful, varied, and dazzling, were still in substance the same with these, and moved in the same sphere to which the Memorabilia are confined : one is at a loss to understand, how it was that, in the course of so many years, Socrates did not clear the marketplace, and the workshops, the walks, and the wrestling- schools, by the dread of his presence, and how it is that, in Xenophon's native Flemish style of painting, the weariness of the interlocutors is not still more strongly exprest, than we here and there actually find it. And still less should we be able to comprehend, why men of such abilities as Critias and Alcibiades, and others formed by nature for speculation, as Plato and Euclid, set so high a value on their intercourse with Socrates, and found satisfaction in it so long. Nor can it be supposed, that Socrates held discourses in public such as Xenophon puts into his mouth, but that he delivered lessons of a different kind elsewhere, and in private ; for this, considering the apologetic form of Xenophon'^s book, to which he rigidly confines himself^ he would probably not have passed over in silence. Socrates must have disclosed the philosophical element of his character in the same social circle of which Xenophon gives us specimens. And is not this just the im- pression which Xenophon's conversations make ? philosophical matter, translated into the unphilosophical style of the common understanding, an operation in which the philosophical base is lost; just as some critics have proposed, by way of test for the productions of the loftiest poetry, to resolve them into prose, and evaporate their spirit, which can leave no- thing but an extremely sober kind of beauty remaining. And as after such an experiment the greatest of poets would scarcely be able exactly to restore the lost poetry, but yet a reader of moderate capacity soon observes what has been
