Cicero learnt his art from Demosthenes, and Burke from Cicero. Cleverness is the distinguishing mark of Demosthenes; his style is restrained and logical. I do not think he was morally great, or even more than tolerably honest, but he was so subtle a pleader that I for one always have an instinctive desire to take the other side. Isocrates, “the old man eloquent,” who died about 338 B.C., is an interesting figure, very typical of his day. He became a professor of rhetoric, and kept a school in which he had a hundred pupils, each of whom paid him 1000 drachmæ for the course. He received as much as thirty talents for writing a single speech. But he was a pure theorist; he scarcely ever delivered his orations, which were written for private reading, and carefully polished for that purpose. Some modern historians discern in him a statesman of wide and lofty views. It is true that he advocated peace, retrenchment, and reform for Athens. It is true also that he spoke in his great Panegyric Oration, a work which had taken him ten years to write, in favour of concerted action by Hellas against the Persians. But I fear that Isocrates as a Panhellenist is a fraud. Panhellenic orations on the text of the Persian wars were a standing dish at the Olympic festival. Gorgias of Leontini, among others, had delivered a similar oration in [Illustration: PLATE LXXVIII. GREEK GEMS _Mansell & Co._] past years. It is surely a proof of the deadness of Panhellenic feeling in Greece that the assembled States could periodically applaud such orations and then go home and sign the peace which the Great King had sent down from Susa. Moreover, the Panegyric itself is written in a very curious tone for a genuine internationalist. He begins very happily: “Athens and Sparta united, shoulder to shoulder, as they stood at Platæa, Athens and Sparta ... yes, but in that order, mind you.... Athens must come first.... Sparta is, and always has been, a bully and a sneak ... don’t you remember ...?” That is the spirit of the Panegyric. Nor is the style really comparable to that of Demosthenes. Carefully constructed as it is, it smells of the lamp; there is a wearisome mellifluousness in its cadences, and a horrid odour of self-consciousness and self-righteousness in its tone.