The eloquence which statesmen employed to recommend their measures, the sophists applied to fictitious uses, imagining themselves in impossible circumstances, reversing times, confounding manners, and attacking or defending men long since dead. In all such cases the interest would chiefly depend on the novelty or ingenuity of the thoughts and the subtle artifices of style. Hence the extravagance, the coldness, the perversion of imagery, the distortion and monkey tricks of language, for which their manner of compositions became remarkable. The false position they took up led, in philosophy, to results equally disastrous. To aim at truth, would have been to throw themselves into the wake of the philosophers, to share, without worldly compensation, their dangers, labours, and comparative insignificance. They struck out, therefore, a new course for themselves. Taking philosophy as it was, they undertook to dispute on all and every part of it; to show that for a skilful dialectician there was no proposition that might not with nearly equal facility be attacked or defended; that by means of syllogisms or enthymemes, artfully arranged, darkness may be proved to be light, and light darkness; that between lying and speaking the truth there is no difference; that in fact both veracity and falsehood are nonentities, all our notions being mere arbitrary fictions; and that to beat your dog and to beat your father is the same thing. Of this novel and ingenious style of argumentation,[833] in which Hudibras was an adept, we are furnished with abundant examples by Plato, more especially in the Euthydemus, where two old fellows, with arguments longer than their beards, luxuriate in the felicitous inventions by which, like another Circe, they are enabled to transform their hearers into hogs and bulldogs. In humorous extravagance the dialogue scarcely falls short of an Aristophanic comedy or a Christmas pantomime. Socrates[834] plays the Clown, Ctesippos the Harlequin, and the blows dealt upon the magicians in the course of the piece, are such as, were they fully comprehended, would set all Drury Lane or Covent Garden in a roar. But the length of the scenes prevents their transplantation into my pages, and the abridgment of a joke is a very dull thing. Let us, however, hear by what logic they proved Socrates to have been a second “man without a navel.” Footnote 833: Another example may be found in Athen. iii. 54. Footnote 834: Socrates has been confounded with the Sophists, because he frequented their company to refute them; but there was between them the same difference, as between a thief-taker and a thief. “Answer me,” cried Dionysidoros. “Well then,” replied Socrates, “I answer that Iolaus was the nephew of Heracles, and, as far as I can see, no nephew of mine. For my brother Patrocles was not his father, but quite another guess sort of person, Iphicles the brother of Heracles.” “And Patrocles was your brother?”