Plato held the opposite view. He would have agreed with the advice given by Chesterfield to his son, "Lay aside the best book when you can go into the best company--depend upon it you change for the better." Plato did, indeed, characterize books as "immortal sons deifying their sires." But, on the opposite side, he has that memorable passage, part of which I now quote, from the same source that has supplied several others of my quotations, Mr. Alexander Ireland's "Book-Lover's Enchiridion." "Writing," says Plato, "has this terrible disadvantage, which puts it on the same footing with painting. The artist's productions stand before you, as if they were alive: but if you ask them anything, they keep a solemn silence. Just so with written discourse: you would fancy it full of the thoughts it speaks: but if you ask it something that you want to know about what is said, it looks at you always with the same one sign. And, once committed to writing, discourse is tossed about everywhere indiscriminately, among those who understand and those to whom it is naught, and who cannot select the fit from the unfit." Plato further complains, adds Mr. Martineau, that "Theuth, the inventor of letters, had ruined men's memories and living command of their knowledge, by inducing a lazy trust in records ready to their hand: and he limits the benefit of the _litera scripta_ to the compensation it provides for the failing memory of old age, when reading naturally becomes the great solace of life.... Plato's tone is invariably depreciatory of everything committed to writing, with the exception of laws." This was also the early Rabbinical view, for while the Law might, nay, must, be written, the rest of the tradition was to be orally confided. The oral book was the specialty of the Rabbinical schools. We moderns, who are to the ancients, in Rabbinic phrase, as asses to angels in intellect, cannot rely upon oral teaching--our memory is too weak to bear the strain. Even when a student attends an oral lecture, he proves my point, because he takes notes.