With an art, in which Shakespeare was no mean proficient, he opens up a more culpable source of interest in the frequent satire of vices, condemned as commonly as they are practised. He unveils the mysteries of iniquity with a fearless and by no means an unreluctant hand. No abyss of wickedness was too dark for his daring muse. He ventured fearlessly upon themes which few since or before have touched on, despising contemporary envy and vindictiveness and the stern condemnation of posterity. To be plain, he evidently shared in the worst corruptions of his age, and, like many other satirists, availed himself joyfully of the mask of satire as an apology for entertaining his own imagination with the description of them. No one with the least clearsightedness or candour can fail to perceive and acknowledge the depraved moral character of this comic writer. Only less filthy than Rabelais, his fancy runs riot among the moral jakes and common sewers of the world, over which, by consummate art and the matchless magic of his style, he contrives unhappily to cast a kind of delusive halo, and to breathe a fragrance which should never be found but where virtue is. Upon the subject of his attack on Socrates his defenders must grant one of two things—that he libelled him ignorantly, or that he exhibited a degree of wickedness capable, under other circumstances, of rising to the enormity of Judas Iscariot. Socrates, both for genius and for virtue, stands at the head of the pagan world. He whom Plato admired must have stood on a higher level than Plato,—that is, have occupied the apex of mere humanity: and in that position we find him in the Gorgias, the Republic, the Euthyphron, and the Phædon. Many charlatans, since the days of Aristophanes, have endeavoured to puff upward at him the smoke of their ignorance or their envy; and from those who tread the mire with them have for a moment hidden the all but divine serenity that smiles on humankind from that lofty and immovable basis where the homage of a world has placed him; but the next breeze has cleared away the stinking vapours, and left both him and them where they were,—the one on the highest, the others on the lowest step of the ladder which connects human nature with the skies.