In reading his works, one must have the secret of his method. Written, as these are, in the simplest style of composition, his reader may sometimes weary of the slow progress of the argument, and lose himself in the devious windings of the dialogue. But this is the sole subtraction from the pleasure of perusal,--the voluminous sacrifices thus made to method: so much given to compliment, to dulness, in the interlinked threads of the golden colloquy. Yet Plato rewards as none other; his regal text is everywhere charged with lively sense, flashing in every line, every epithet, episode, with the rubies and pearls of universal wisdom. And the reading is a coronation.[20] [Footnote 20: "The philosophy of the fourth century, B. C.," says Grote, "is peculiarly valuable and interesting, not merely from its intrinsic speculative worth,--from the originality and grandeur of its two principal heroes, Plato and Aristotle,--from its coincidence with the full display of dramatic, rhetorical, artistic genius, but also from a fourth reason not unimportant because it is purely Hellenic; preceding the development of Alexandrian and the amalgamation of Oriental veins of thought, with the inspirations of the Academy and the Lyceum. The Orentes and the Jordan had not yet begun to flow westward, and to impart their own color to the waters of Attica and Latium. Not merely the real, but also the ideal, world present to the minds of Plato and Aristotle, were purely Hellenic. Even during the century immediately following, this had ceased to be fully true in respect to the philosophers of Athens; and it became less and less true with each succeeding century. New foreign centres of rhetoric and literature, Asiatic and Alexandrian Hellenism, were fostered into importance by regal enactments. Plato and Aristotle are thus the special representatives of genuine Hellenic philosophy. The remarkable intellectual ascendancy acquired by them in their day and maintained over succeeding centuries, was one main reason why the Hellenic vein was enabled so long to maintain itself, though in impoverished condition, against adverse influences from the East, ever increasing in force. Plato and Aristotle outlasted all their pagan successors,--successors at once less purely Hellenic and less gifted. And when St. Jerome, near seven hundred and fifty years after the decease of Plato, commemorated with triumph the victory of unlettered Christians over the accomplishments and genius of paganism, he illustrated the magnitude of the victory by singling out Plato and Aristotle as the representatives of vanquished philosophy."--_Grote's Preface to Life of Plato._]