should say, there is a greater chance that Aristophanes truly represented the feeling of his age about Socrates than Plato, who, at best, gives us the Socrates as endeared to his private friends--the man of matured thought, and possibly of much altered and more chastened views. Nor ought we to forget that Plato is as severe against the Sophists generally as Aristophanes is against Socrates in particular. All high teaching at Athens--all that we include in the idea of a college education--was done by the Sophists. The art of ῥητορικὴ was one of the most important: we can see the effect of the training incidentally in the style and the speeches of Euripides and Thucydides. Socrates saw that the ethical principles of the Sophists were wrong, and he engaged in the dangerous task of trying to reform them. But secondly, the Platonic passage gives us a clue to that sympathy which Socrates, or at least Plato, always shows for the Eleatic school of philosophy as represented by Zeno and Parmenides. 'Of all the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato speaks of the Eleatic with the greatest respect,' says Mr. Jowett (Preface to _Philebus_, p. 227). That school was a reaction from the teaching of the Ionic physicists, Thales, Anaximenes, and others, who were speculators on natural phenomena without any true system of induction. Anaxagoras' doctrine of Νοῦς, or pervading intelligence, though purely a pantheistic one, stood half-way between the two schools. Xenocrates, the founder of the Eleatics, taught that Creation emanated from a One Being, and not from a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, from water or air, or states of repose, or flux, or any other mere physical reason. In the Philebus (p. 28, C., and p. 30, D.) we find an express eulogy and sympathy with Anaxagoras, whose views were in truth much more adapted to the doctrine of ἰδέαι and abstractions than the materialistic views of the Ionic school. And in the _Parmenides_, one of the most obscure of the Platonic dialogues, the discussions on τὸ ἓν, The One, and the relations of the real to the phenomenal, though a great advance over the Eleatic doctrines, which, as Mr. Jowett says, 'had not gone beyond the contradictions of matter, motion, space, and the like' (Introd. _Parmen._, p. 234), still are based on the views of Zeno in the main. Parmenides, indeed, was 'the founder of idealism, and also of dialectic, or, in modern phraseology, of metaphysics and logic.' (_Ibid._)