_Phæd_. I suppose that, like the man who gave his vote against Aristides, because it wearied him to hear any man surnamed _the just_, Philebus is annoyed by finding that so many people look up to Mr. Ricardo as an oracle. _Phil_. No: for the very opposite reason; it is because I hear him generally complained of as obscure, and as ambitiously paradoxical; two faults which I cannot tolerate: and the extracts from his writings which I have seen satisfy me that this judgment is a reasonable one. _Phæd_. In addition to which, Philebus, I now recollect something which perhaps weighs with you still more, though you have chosen to suppress it; and _that_ is, that you are a disciple of Mr. Malthus, every part of whose writings, since the year 1816 (I am assured), have had one origin--jealousy of Mr. Ricardo, "quem si non aliqua nocuisset, mortuus esset." _X_. No, no, Phædrus; we must not go so far as _that_; though undoubtedly it is true that Mr. Malthus has often conducted his opposition in a most vexatious and disingenuous manner. _Phil_. How so? In what instance? In what instance? _X_. In this, for one. Mr. Malthus, in his "Political Economy" (1820), repeatedly charged Mr. Ricardo with having confounded the two notions of "cost" and "value:" I smile, by the way, when I repeat such a charge, as if it were the office of a Ricardo to confound, or of a Malthus to distinguish: but "Non usque adeo permiscuit imis Longus summa dies, ut non--si voce Metelli Serventur leges--malint a Cæsare tolli." [Footnote: For the sake of the unclassical reader, I add a prose translation:--Not to such an extent has the lapse of time confounded things highest with things lowest, as that--if the laws can be saved only by the voice of a Metellus--they would not rather choose to be abolished by a Cæsar.] _Phil_. "Imis!" Why, I hope, if Mr. Ricardo may do for the Cæsar of the case, Mr. Malthus is not therefore to be thought the Metellus. "Imis," indeed!