_Landor_. Pshaw! You Scotchmen are no scholars. Let me proceed. Virgil has no nature. And, by the way, his translator Dryden, too, is greatly overrated. _North_..--Glorious John? _Landor_.--Glorious fiddlestick! It is insufferable that a rhymer should be called glorious, whose only claim to notice is a clever drinking song. _North_.--A drinking song? _Landor_. Yes, the thing termed an Ode for St. Cecilia's Day. _North_.--Hegh, sir, indeed! Well, let us go on with the Ancients, and dispatch them first. To revert to the Greeks, from whom Virgil's imitation of the Iliad drew us aside, favour me with your opinion of Plato. [Footnote 48: See Mr. Landor's "Imaginary Conversations."--Vol. i. p. 44, and ii. p. 322, note.] [Footnote 50: Vol. i p. 269, 270.] [Footnote 51: Vol. i. p. 300.] _Landor_.--Plato is disingenuous and malicious. I fancy I have detected him in more than one dark passage, a dagger in his hand and a bitter sneer on his countenance.[52] He stole (from the Eyptian priests and other sources) every idea his voluminous books convey. [53] Plato was a thief. _North_.--"Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief." _Landor_.--Do you mean to insinuate that my dialogues are stolen from Plato's? _North_.--Certainly not, Mr. Landor; there is not the remotest resemblance between them. Lucian and Christopher North are your models. What do you think of Aristotle? _Landor_.--In Plato we find only arbours and grottoes, with moss and shell work all misplaced. Aristotle has built a solider edifice, but has built it across the road. We must throw it down again. [54] _North_.--So much for philosophy. What have you to say to Xenophon as an historian? _Landor_.--He is not inelegant, but he is unimpassioned and affected; [55] and he has not even preserved the coarse features of nations and of ages in his Cyropaedia.[56] _North_.--The dunce! But what of the Anabasis? _Landor_.--You may set Xenophon down as a writer of graceful mediocrity.[57] _North_.--Herodotus? _Landor_.--If I blame Herodotus, whom can I commend? His view of history was nevertheless like that of the Asiatics, and there can be little to instruct and please us in the actions and speeches of barbarians.[58] _North_.--Which of the Greek tragedians do you patronise? _Landor_.--Aeschylus is not altogether unworthy of his reputation; he is sometimes grand, but oftener flighty and obscure.[59] _North_.--What say you of Sophocles? _Landor_.--He is not so good as his master, though the Athenians thought otherwise. He is, however, occasionally sublime. _North_.--What of Euripides? [60]