The reader will find, that in this second part I have endeavoured to illustrate and explain several things, that were obscure and only hinted at in the first. Whilst I was forming this design, I found, on the one hand, that, as to myself, the easiest way of executing it, would be by dialogue; but I knew, on the other, that to discuss opinions, and manage controversies, it is counted the most unfair manner of writing. When partial men have a mind to demolish an adversary, and triumph over him with little expence, it has long been a frequent practice to attack him with dialogues, in which the champion, who is to lose the battle, appears at the very beginning of the engagement, to be the victim that is to be sacrificed, and seldom makes a better figure than cocks on Shrove-Tuesday, that receive blows, but return none, and are visibly set up on purpose to be knocked down. That this is to be said against dialogues, is certainly true; but it is as true, that there is no other manner of writing, by which greater reputation has been obtained. Those, who have most excelled all others in it, were the two most famous authors of all antiquity, Plato and Cicero: the one wrote almost all his philosophical works in dialogues, and the other has left us nothing else. It is evident, then, that the fault of those, who have not succeeded in dialogues; was in the management, and not in the manner of writing; and that nothing but the ill use that has been made of it, could ever have brought it into disrepute. The reason why Plato preferred dialogues to any other manner of writing, he said, was, that things thereby might look, as if they were acted, rather than told: the same was afterwards given by Cicero in the same words, rendered into his own language. The greatest objection that in reality lies against it, is the difficulty there is in writing them well. The chief of Plato's interlocutors was always his master Socrates, who every where maintains his character with great dignity; but it would have been impossible to have made such an extraordinary person speak like himself on so many emergencies, if Plato had not been as great a man as Socrates.