Diog. Laert. ix. 55. observes that, according to some writers, he died, at the age of 90, during a journey.—Geel, p. 81. It is sufficiently remarkable that most of the Sophists attained to a very great old age, and the same thing may be said generally of the philosophers of antiquity. Lord Bacon undertakes to account for the fact. Having given the palm of long life to hermits and anchorites, he says: “Next unto this is a life led in good letters, such as was that of Philosophers, Rhetoricians, Grammarians. This life is also led in leisure, and in those thoughts which, seeing they are severed from the affairs of the world, bite not, but rather delight through their vanity and impertinency: they live also at their pleasure, spending their time in such things as like them best, and for the most part in the company of young men, which is ever the most cheerful.”—History of Life and Death, p. 24. But I cannot here pursue the history of the sophists, which no further belongs to my work than as it is connected with the subject of education. On their writings, however, and manner of teaching it is necessary that I should be more explicit. Whether Gorgias first published or Protagoras is of little moment; both evidently wrote with the same aim, which was to confound truth and error, right and wrong, not perhaps through any enmity to truth or to virtue, but from the sheer vanity of being thought capable of any thing, and the desire of converting their talents to account. One distinguishing quality of the class was fertility. They piqued themselves on being able to pour forth volume after volume, treatise after treatise, speech after speech. This, indeed, it was that constituted their principal claim to superiority over the philosophers, a pains-taking race, among whom the period of intellectual gestation was longer than that of the elephant; whereas your true sophist, without meditation, study or experience, astonished his admirers by the copiousness of his invention, by imagery, gorgeous and glittering, generally stolen from the poets, and by a piquant air of profoundness and originality, which the art of seeming to doubt all that other men believe never fails to confer.