deducer; all has been discovered; and he tries to discover nothing more. Those who followed him seem to have commented on his comments. With him Neoplatonism properly ends. Is its last utterance a culmination or a fall? Have the Titans sealed heaven, or died of old age, “exhibiting,” as Gibbon says of them, “a deplorable instance of the senility of the human mind?” Read Proclus, and judge for yourselves: but first contrive to finish everything else you have to do which can possibly be useful to any human being. Life is short, and Art—at least the art of obtaining practical guidance from the last of the Alexandrians—very long. And yet—if Proclus and his school became gradually unfaithful to the great root-idea of their philosophy, we must not imitate them. We must not believe that the last of the Alexandrians was under no divine teaching, because he had be-systemed himself into confused notions of what that teaching was like. Yes, there was good in poor old Proclus; and it too came from the only source whence all good comes. Were there no good in him I could not laugh at him as I have done; I could only hate him. There are moments when he rises above his theories; moments when he recurs in spirit, if not in the letter, to the faith of Homer, almost to the faith of Philo. Whether these are the passages of his which his modern admirers prize most, I cannot tell. I should fancy not: nevertheless I will read you one of them. He is about to commence his discourses on the Parmenides, that book in which we generally now consider that Plato has been most untrue to himself, and fallen from his usual inductive method to the ground of a mere _à priori_ theoriser—and yet of which Proclus is reported to have said, and, I should conceive, said honestly, that if it, the Timæus, and the Orphic fragments were preserved, he did not care whether every other book on earth were destroyed. But how does he commence?