he meant to say that all things are the offspring of flow and movement.[73] The Platonists held that when Zeus reminded Hera of the time when he had hung her trembling by a golden chain in the vast concave of heaven, it was God speaking to matter which he had taken and bound by the chains of laws.[74] The Stoics read into the poets so much Stoicism, that Cicero says, in good-humoured banter, that you would think the old poets, who had really no suspicion of such things, to have been Stoical philosophers.[75] Sometimes Homer was treated as a kind of encyclopædia. Xenophon, in his _Banquet_,[76] makes one of the speakers, who could repeat Homer by heart, say that “the wisest of mankind had written about almost all human things;” and there is a treatise by an unknown author of imperial times which endeavours to show in detail that he contains the beginning of every one of the later sciences, historical, philosophical, and political.[77] When he calls men deep-voiced and women high-voiced, he shows his knowledge of the distinctions of music. When he gives to each character its appropriate style of speech, he shows his knowledge of rhetoric. He is the father of political science, in having given examples of each of the three forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy. He is the father of military science, in the information which he gives about tactics and siege-works. He knew and taught astronomy and medicine, gymnastics and surgery; “nor would a man be wrong if he were to say that he was a teacher of painting also.” This indifference to the actual meaning of a writer, and the habit of reading him by the light of the reader’s own fancies, have a certain analogy in our own day in the feeling with which we sometimes regard other works of art. We stand before some great masterpiece of painting—the St. Cecilia or the Sistine Madonna—and are, as it were, carried off our feet by the wonder of it. We must be cold critics if we simply ask ourselves what Raffaelle meant by it. We interpret it by our own emotions. The picture speaks to us with a personal and individual voice. It links itself with a thousand memories of the past and a thousand dreams of the future. It translates us into another world—the world of a lost and impossible love, the dreamland of achieved aspirations, the tender and half-tearful heaven of forgiven sins: we are ready to believe, if only for a moment, that Raffaelle meant by it all that it means to us; and for what he did actually mean, we have but little care. * * * * *