amusement for a bad one, when the man who can play with words sports upon the subject of justice and suchlike. So it is, my dear Phædrus, but it is, I take it, earnest in a far higher sense, when one, using the art of dialectics, takes hold of a fitting soul, and plants and sows with true knowledge words able to help both themselves and their planter, not fruitless, but having seed, whence growing up in a succession of minds they will from age to age produce an immortal line,(391) and will make their possessor happy as far as man can be.” In these words, put in his master’s mouth, Plato, if I mistake not, has given us the whole purpose of his life, and the manner in which he hoped to accomplish it. It was in the Academia that he sought to establish that immortal line of living words, who should speak as the possessors of real knowledge upon justice, truth, and goodness. He is describing a living culture by living teachers, of whom he aspired to be himself the first; and the written dialogues which he has left are in his intention, and so far as they enter at all upon the higher points of his doctrine,(392) reminders of that which he had set forth to chosen auditors by word of mouth, the word which was able, as he says, to explain and defend itself, and to answer a question put to it. This, then, was the relation existing in the mind of the prince of Greek philosophers between the written and the spoken word as instruments in imparting true knowledge, or science. The written word he regarded as subsidiary, as presupposing instruction by question and answer, and still more the moral discipline of a life earnestly given up to the study of the subjects in question. Without this a writing by itself was like a figure in a picture, which makes an impression on the beholder, but when asked if it is the true impression keeps, as he says, a solemn face, and makes no reply; which is the same to all, the earnest and the indifferent, and cannot treat them according to their merits. He laughs at the notion of such a writing being by itself any more than sport. And let us remember that he who said this has enshrined his own philosophy in the most finished specimens of dramatic dialogues which the Greek mind produced. These are the statements of the man who wrote Greek in his countrymen’s opinion as Jupiter would have spoken it. There are, then, in Plato’s mind three constituents of teaching: first, the choice of fitting subjects for it, and what is therein implied, the imposition of a moral discipline upon them regulating their life to the end in view; secondly, the master’s oral instruction conveying gradually and with authority to minds so prepared the doctrine to be received; and thirdly, the committing such doctrine to writing, which shall serve to _remind_ the disciple of what he has been taught. And this was what he carried into effect.(393) He fixed himself at the Academia, over which he presided for forty years: he was succeeded