And those who take part in it! If Plato did not create the "Socrates" of his Dialogues, he has created other characters hardly less life- like. The young Charmides, the incarnation of natural, as the aged Cephalus of acquired, temperance; his Sophoclean amenity as he sits there pontifically at the altar, in the court of his peaceful house; the large company, of varied character and of every age, which moves in those Dialogues, though still oftenest the young [130] in all their youthful liveliness:--who that knows them at all can doubt Plato's hold on persons, that of persons on him? Sometimes, even when they are not formally introduced into his work, characters that had interested, impressed, or touched him, inform and colour it, as if with their personal influence, showing through what purports to be the wholly abstract analysis of some wholly abstract moral situation. Thus, the form of the dying Socrates himself is visible pathetically in the description of the suffering righteous man, actually put into his own mouth in the second book of The Republic; as the winning brilliancy of the lost spirit of Alcibiades infuses those pages of the sixth, which discuss the nature of one by birth and endowments an aristocrat, amid the dangers to which it is exposed in the Athens of that day--the qualities which must make him, if not the saviour, the destroyer, of a society which cannot remain unaffected by his showy presence. Corruptio optimi pessima! Yet even here, when Plato is dealing with the inmost elements of personality, his eye is still on its object, on character as seen in characteristics, through those details, which make character a sensible fact, the changes of colour in the face as of tone in the voice, the gestures, the really physiognomic value, or the mere tricks, of gesture and glance and speech. What is visibly expressive in, or upon, persons; those flashes of temper which check yet give [131] renewed interest to the course of a conversation; the delicate touches of intercourse, which convey to the very senses all the subtleties of the heart or of the intelligence:--it is always more than worth his while to make note of these.