Impossible as it would seem to transmute Socrates into a _mythus_, considering the broad daylight which then rested upon Athenian history, and the inextricable way in which Socrates is entangled in that history (although we have all seen many a Scriptural personage so transmuted under far less colourable pretenses or advantages), still it is evident that the mediaeval schoolmen _did_ practically treat Socrates as something of that sort--as a mythical, symbolic, or representative man. Socrates is the eternal burthen of their quillets, quodlibets, problems, syllogisms; for them he is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, that much-suffering man; or, to speak more adequately, for _them_ he is the John Doe and the Richard Roe of English law, whose feuds have tormented the earth and incensed the heavens through a cycle of uncounted centuries, and must have given a bad character of our planet on its English side. To such an extent was this pushed, that many of the scholastic writers became wearied of enunciating or writing his name, and, anticipating the occasional fashion of _My lud_ and _Your ludship_ at our English Bar, or of _Hocus Pocus_ as an abbreviation of pure weariness for _Hoc est Corpus_, they called him not _Socrates_, but _Sortes_. Now, whence, let me ask, was this custom derived? As to Doe and Roe, who or what first set them by the ears together is now probably past all discovery. But as to _Sortes_, that he was a mere contraction for _Socrates_ is proved in the same way that _Mob_ is shown to have been a brief way of writing _Mobile vulgus_, viz., that by Bishop Stillingfleet in particular the two forms, _Mob_ and _Mobile vulgus_ are used interchangeably and indifferently through several pages consecutively--just as _Canter_ and _Canterbury gallop_, of which the one was at first the mere shorthand expression of the other, were at one period interchanged, and for the same reason. The abbreviated form wore the air of plebeian slang at its first introduction, but its convenience favoured it: soon it became reconciled to the ear, then it ceased to be slang, and finally the original form, ceasing to have any apparent advantage of propriety or elegance, dropped into total disuse. _Sortes_, it is a clear case, inherited from Socrates his distressing post of target-general for the arrows of disputatious Christendom. But how came Socrates by that distinction? I cannot have a doubt that it was strength of tradition that imputed such a use of the Socratic name and character to Plato. The reader must remember that, although Socrates was no _mythus_, and least of all could be such, to his own leading disciple, that was no reason why he should not be treated as a _mythus_. In Wales, some nine or ten years ago, _Rebecca_, as the mysterious and masqued redresser of public wrongs, was rapidly passing into a _mythical_ expression for that universal character of Rhadamanthian avenger or vindicator. So of Captain Rock, in Ireland. So of Elias amongst the Jews