But I must here repeat, that because I find, in this or any other dialogue, some peculiarities not usual with Plato, I do not feel warranted thereby in declaring the dialogue spurious. In my judgment, we must look for a large measure of diversity in the various dialogues; and I think it an injudicious novelty, introduced by Schleiermacher, to set up a canonical type of Platonism, all deviations from which are to be rejected as forgeries. Both the First and the Second Alkibiadês appear to me genuine, even upon the showing of those very critics who disallow them. Schleiermacher, Stallbaum, and Steinhart, all admit that there is in both the dialogues a considerable proportion of Sokratic and Platonic ideas: but they maintain that there are also other ideas which are not Sokratic or Platonic, and that the texture, style, and prolixity of the Second Alkibiadês (Schleiermacher maintains this about the First also) are unworthy of Plato. But if we grant these premisses, the reasonable inference would be, not to disallow it altogether, but to admit it as a work by Plato, of inferior merit; perhaps of earlier days, before his powers of composition had attained their maturity. To presume that because Plato composed many excellent dialogues, therefore all that he composed must have been excellent, is a pretension formally disclaimed by many critics, and asserted by none.[42] Steinhart himself allows that the Second Alkibiadês, though not composed by Plato, is the work of some other author contemporary, an untrained Sokratic disciple attempting to imitate Plato.[44] But we do not know that there were any contemporaries who tried to imitate Plato: though Theopompus accused him of imitating others, and called most of his dialogues useless as well as false: while Plato himself, in his inferior works, will naturally appear like an imitator of his better self. [Footnote 43: Stallbaum (Prolegg. ad Alcib. i. p. 186) makes this general statement very justly, but he as well as other critics are apt to forget it in particular cases.] [Footnote 44: Steinhart, Einleitung, p. 516-519. Stallbaum and Boeckh indeed assign the dialogue to a later period. Heindorf (ad Lysin, p. 211) thinks it the work "antiqui auctoris, sed non Platonis".