I cannot agree with M. Boeckh in regarding this _nimia similitudo_ as the strongest part of his case. On the contrary, I consider it as the weakest: because his own premisses (in my judgment) not only do not prove his conclusion, but go far to prove the opposite. When we find him insisting, in such strong language, upon the great analogy which subsists between the Minos and seven of the incontestable Platonic dialogues, this is surely a fair proof that its author is the same as their author. To me it appears as conclusive as internal evidence ever can be; unless there be some disproof _aliunde_ to overthrow it. But M. Boeckh produces no such disproof. He converts these analogies into testimony in his own favour, simply by bestowing upon them the name _imitatio,--stulta imitatio_ (p. 27). This word involves an hypothesis, whereby the point to be proved is assumed--viz.: difference of authorship. "Plato cannot have imitated himself" (M. Boeckh observes). I cannot admit such impossibility, even if you describe the fact in that phrase: but if you say "Plato in one dialogue thought and wrote like Plato in another"--you describe the same fact in a different phrase, and it then appears not merely possible but natural and probable. Those very real analogies, to which M. Boeckh points in the word _imitatio_, are in my judgment cases of the Platonic thought in one dialogue being like the Platonic thought in another. The _similitudo_, between Minos and these other dialogues, can hardly be called _nimia_, for M. Boeckh himself points out that it is accompanied with much difference. It is a similitude, such as we should expect between one Platonic dialogue and another: with this difference, that whereas, in the Minos, Plato gives the same general views in a manner more brief, crude, abrupt--in the other dialogues he works them out with greater fulness of explanation and illustration, and some degree of change not unimportant. That there should be this amount of difference between one dialogue of Plato and another appears to me perfectly natural. On the other hand--that there should have been a contemporary _falsarius_ (scriptor miser, insulsus, vilissimus, to use phrases of M. Boeckh), who studied and pillaged the best dialogues of Plato, for the purpose of putting together a short and perverted abbreviation of them--and who contrived to get his miserable abbreviation recognised by the Byzantine Aristophanes among the genuine dialogues notwithstanding the existence of the Platonic school--this, I think highly improbable.