himself--for when he lay down he had thrown his mantle over his face--and said,--which were the last words he uttered--_O Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius; pay the vow and do not forget_; and with that drew the mantle again over his face. It shall be done, said Crito; have you nothing else to say? But now there was no reply; and, after a short interval, a convulsive motion shook the body, and the man going up uncovered his face, and we saw that his eyes were fixed. Then Crito going up closed his mouth and his eyes. And this, O Echecrates, was the end of our beloved companion and friend, a man of whom we may truly say, OF ALL MEN WHOM WE HAVE KNOWN, HE WAS THE BEST, THE WISEST, AND THE MOST JUST.” ARISTOTLE. {127} THERE is a natural sequence in the processes of social culture which is well illustrated by the history of Moral Philosophy among the Greeks. The man of action comes before the man of literature, the man of literature before the man of science. In Greek ethics Socrates was the man of action, Plato the man of literature, and Aristotle the man of science. Not, of course, that Plato was merely the literary man, in the trivial modern sense of that word; he was eminently the philosopher--not merely φιλόλογος but φιλόσοφος--but he put forth his philosophy in a popular form; he addressed himself to the imagination as well as the reason; he appealed, as we would say, to the general public; and speaking to men in a human way, on the most interesting of human topics, through the medium of language artistically handled, he falls manifestly under the broad category of the literary as opposed to the scientific man, who works on a special subject, and with a special faculty. But Aristotle was pre-eminently, and with very marked features, the man of knowledge; he came with the dissecting knife in hand and addressed himself to those who were willing to make special dissections with him for the mere purpose of knowing, and drew a broad line of {128} demarcation between the speculative and the practical world. Nevertheless the Stagirite was something more than a knowing machine; he was a man, and by virtue of his Hellenic birth also a citizen. He could not therefore avoid occupying to a certain extent the province of the practical man; and so it has come to pass that in three great works, the _Ethics_, the _Politics_, and the _Rhetoric_, he has transported himself from the teacher’s chair, and entered into competition with Socrates and Plato as a preacher of social morals and a guide to civic conduct. This was well both for him and for us: well for him, because mere knowing can never exhaust the riches of a nature so essentially practical as that of man: well for us, because otherwise we could scarcely have imagined the phenomenon of an intellect at once so complete in all the categories of scientific cognition, and so strongly marked with all the sagacity that belongs to the so-called practical man, the man of society, the