The philosophy to which Plato gives his name, recalls at once all that is most profound in thought and pleasing in imagination. But no isolated genius can be correctly appreciated. His predecessors, Socrates and Anaxagoras, as well as his successors, the Neoplatonists, must be taken into joint consideration, or the great master in whom philosophic grandeur culminated will not himself be properly understood. Neither is the Sceptic school of Pyrrho, nor the Stoic school of Zeus; Democritus, of Abdera, radiant with smiles, or Heraclitus, of Ephesus, bathed in tears, to be discarded from the view, when we would sum up the aggregated worth of that philosophic age. But the hour has come when the god of philosophy, a son of Metis, or Wisdom, realized the menace put into the mouth of Prometheus by Æschylus, and Zeus with his compeers is driven into the caverns of the West to share the exile of Cronus. Who was the predestined instrument of all this? Stagirus, the birthplace of Aristotle, was situated on the western side of the Strymonic gulf; a region which, in soil and appearance, resembles much the southern part of the bay of Naples. When seventeen years old, he came to Athens, the centre of all civilization, and the focus of every thing that was brilliant in action or thought. Plato fired his mind, and fortified that wonderful industry in his hardy pupil, which enabled him, first among men, to acquire almost encyclopædic knowledge in collecting, criticizing, and digesting the most comprehensive mass of materials. So extraordinary was the application of Aristotle, that Plato called his residence "the house of the reader."