march directly onwards, and refuse to give way to a citizen. The common mutation of things from one extreme to another.

P. 564. The division of those who bear sway in a democracy into three kinds: 1. The busy, bold, and active poor, who are ready to undertake and execute any thing; 2. The idle and insignificant poor, who follow the former, and serve to make a number and a noise in the popular assemblies; and 3. The middling sort, who earn their bread by their labour, and have naturally little inclination to public affairs, nor are easily brought together, but when allured by the hopes of some gain, yet, when collected, are the strongest party of all. The conversion of a demagogue into a tyrant, from necessity and from fear, the steps which he takes to attain the supreme power, the policy of tyrants, and the misery of their condition, are excellently described.

P. 568. The accusation of the tragic poets, as inspiring a love of tyranny, and patronized by tyrants; they are encouraged also in democracies, and are little esteemed in better governments.

NOTES ON THE GREEK TEXT.

P. 544. The Cretan.] Lycurgus borrowed his constitution from that of the Cretans, as Herodotus, Strabo, Plutarch, and other writers, allow; and it is plain, that Plato thought it the best form of government that any where existed, which seems indeed to have been the general opinion of the greatest men in Greece.

P. 547. Dwellers around and domestics.] The Lacedæmonians gave the name of Iεpioiкoι, "Dwellers around," to their subjects, the inhabitants of Laconia, who were not Spartans. As they were used, I imagine, hardly enough by their superiors, and had no share in the government, many authors do not distinguish them from the Heliotæ, who were absolutely slaves; yet, in reality, they seem to have been on a distinct footing, being reckoned free men, and employed by the Spartan government to command such troops as they often send abroad, consisting of Heliotæ, to whom they had given their liberty. The Пepioko likewise seem to have had the property of lands, for when Lycurgus divided the country into thirty thousand portions, and gave nine thousand of them to the Spartans, to whom did the other twenty-one thousand portions belong, unless to the IIɛpiouro? who else should people the hundred cities, besides villages, which were once in Laconia? It is plain also, that the IIɛpioirot, served in war, as oπλīrai, “heavy-armed foot," which the Heliotæ never did, as we learn from Thucydides, iv. p. 238, and as in the battle of Platææ, according to Herodotus in ix. 29, there were ten thousand Lacedæmonians, of which five thousand were Spartans; it follows, that the other five thousand were IIspioiko; for he mentions the Heliotæ by themselves, as light-armed troops in number thirty-five thousand, that is, seven to each Spartan; and Xenophon, in Lacedæmon. Republ. p. 289, and Græc. Hist. i. p. 256, plainly distinguishes the 'Youɛioves, who were Spartans, but excluded from the magistracy, the Neodaμúde, who were Heliotæ

made free, the Heliotæ, and the ПɛpioikoL.

See also Isocrates in

Panegyr. p. 11, and in Panathen. p. 270. The Cretans called their slaves, who cultivated the lands, Пɛpioio. See Aristot. Polit. ii. c. 10

BOOK IX.

HEADS OF THE NINTH DIALOGUE.

P. 571. The worst and most lawless of our unnecessary desires are described, which are particularly active in sleep, when we go to our repose after drinking freely, or eating a full meal.

P. 572. The transition of the mind from a democratic to a tyrannical constitution. Debauchery, and what is called love, are the great instruments of this change. Lust and drunkenness, names for two different sorts of madness, between them produce a tyrant.

P. 573. Our desires from indulgence grow stronger and more numerous. Extravagance naturally leads to want, which will be supplied either by fraud or by violence.

P. 575. In states in which there are but a few persons of this turn, and the body of the people are uncorrupted, they usually leave their own country, and enter into the guards of some foreign prince, or serve him in his wars: or, if they have not this opportunity, they stay at home and turn informers, false evidences, highwaymen, and housebreakers, cut-purses, and such characters; but, if they are numerous and strong, they form a party against the laws and liberties of the people, set at their head commonly the worst among them, and erect a despotic government.

The behaviour of a tyrannical nature in private life; unacquainted with friendship, always domineering over, or servilely flattering, his companions.

P. 577. The comparison between a state enslaved, and the mind of a tyrant. The servitude, the poverty, the fears, and the anguish of such a mind are described; and it is proved to be the most miserable of human creatures.

P. 578. The condition of any private man of fortune, who has fifty or more slaves. Such a man with his effects, wife and family, supposed to be separated from the state and his fellow-citizens, in which his security consists, and placed in a desert country at some distance, surrounded with a people, who look upon it as a crime to enslave one's fellow-creatures, and are ready to favour any conspiracy of his servants against him: how anxious and how intolerable would be his condition! Such, and still worse, is that of a tyrant.

P. 581. The pleasures of knowledge and of philosophy are

proved to be superior to those which result from honour or from gain, and from the satisfaction of our appetites. The wise man, the ambitious man, the man of wealth and pleasure, will each of them give the preference to his favourite pursuit, and will undervalue that of the others, but experience is the only proper judge which can decide the question, and the wise man alone possesses that experience; the necessity of his nature must have acquainted him with the pleasure which arises from satisfying our appetites. Honour and the public esteem will be the consequence of his life and studies, as well as of the opulent or of the ambitious man; so that he is equally qualified with them to judge of their pleasures, but not they of his, which they have never experienced.

P. 584. Most of our sensual joys are only a cessation from uneasiness and pain, as are the eager hopes and expectations which attend them. A fine image is drawn of the ordinary life of mankind, of their sordid pursuits, and of their contemptible passions.

P. 588. The recapitulation, and conclusion, that the height of injustice and of wickedness is the height of misery.

P. 590. The intention of all education and laws is to subject the brutal part of our nature to the rational. A scheme of life, worthy of a philosophic mind, is laid down.

NOTE ON THE GREEK TEXT.

P. 578. Fifty slaves.] The more wealthy Greeks had very large families of slaves. In Athens the number of slaves was to that of citizens as 20 to 1: the latter being about 21,000; the former, 400,000. Mnaso of Phocis, a friend of Aristotle, had 1000 slaves or more, as had likewise Nicias, the famous Athenian. In Corinth, there were reckoned 460,000 slaves; at gina, above 470,000; and many a Roman had in his own service above 20,000: this was a computation made Ol. 110, by Demetrius Phalereus.

BOOK X.

HEADS OF THE TENTH DIALOGUE.

P. 595. Plato's apology for himself. His reasons for banishing all imitative poetry from his republic: 1. Because it represents things not as they really are, but as they appear; 2. The wisdom of the poets is not equal to their reputation; 3. There is no example of a state having been better regulated, or of a war better conducted, or of an art improved, by any poet's instructions; and 4. There is no plan of education laid down, no sect nor school found

ed, even by Homer and the most considerable of the poets, as by the philosophers.

P. 602. Their art concurs with the senses to deceive us and to draw off the mind from right reason, it excites and increases the empire of the passions, enervates our resolution, and seduces us by the power of ill example.

P. 604. The passions and vices are easy to imitate by reason of their variety; but the cool, uniform, and simple character of virtue is very difficult to draw, so as to touch or delight a theatre, or any other mixed assembly of men.

P. 607. The power of numbers and of expression over the soul is great, which renders poetry more particularly dangerous.

P. 608. Having shown that virtue is most eligible on its own account, even when destitute of all external rewards, he now comes to explain the happiness which waits upon it in another life, as well as in the present. The immortality of the soul and a state of future rewards and of future punishments are asserted.

NOTES ON THE GREEK TEXT.

P. 595. Plato professes a great admiration, even from a chiid, for Homer, but yet is forced to exclude him from his commonwealth, for a man is not to be held in honour before truth. The Greeks had carried their admiration for Homer to a high pitch of enthusiasm in Plato's time: it was he, they said, who first had formed Greece to knowledge and humanity; and in him were contained all the arts, all morality, politics, and divinity.

P. 600. Els Texvac.] Thales is said to have discovered the annual course of the sun in the ecliptic, and to have made several improvements in astronomy and geometry. To Anacharsis is ascribed the invention of anchors, and of the potter's wheel. See Diog. Laertius.

P. 608. By Zeus, not I.] Is it possible that the immortality of the soul should be a doctrine so unusual, and so little known at Athens, as to cause this surprise in Glauco?--Yet in the Phædo likewise, p. 70, Cebes treats this point in the same manner.

P. 611. Like those who see Glaucus.] He speaks as if this divinity were sometimes actually visible to seafaring men, all covered with seaweed and shells.

P. 614. The story of Er, the Pamphylian, who, when he had lain twelve days dead in appearance on the field of battle, and was placed on the funeral pile, came to life again, and related all he had seen in the other world. The judgment of souls, their progress of a thousand years through the regions of bliss or of misery, the eternal punishment of tyrants, and of others guilty of enormous crimes, in Tartarus, the spindle of Necessity, which turns the eight spheres, and the employment of her three daughters, the Fates, are all described, with the allotment and choice of lives (either in human bodies, or in those of brute animals) permitted to those spirits who are again to appear on earth; as of Orpheus,

who chooses that of a swan, Ajax, of a lion, Thersites, of a monkey, Ulysses, that of an obscure private man, &c. : their passage over the river Lethe is also mentioned. The whole fable is finely written.

Milton alludes to the spindle of Necessity in his entertainment called the Arcades. Virgil has also imitated many parts of the fable in his sixth Eneid, and Tully in the Somnium Scipionis. See Macrob. i. c. 1.

THE LAWS.

THE persons of the dialogue are Clinias, a Cretan of Gnossus, and two strangers, who are his guests, the one a Lacedæmonian, called Megillus, the other an Athenian, who is not named, but who appears by the character and sentiments to be Plato himself. See Diog. Laert. iii. 52. They are, all three, men far advanced in years, and as they walk or repose themselves in the fields under the shade of ancient cypress trees, which grew to a great bulk and beauty, in the way that led from the city of Gnossus to the temple and grotto of Jupiter, (where Minos was believed to have received his laws from the god himself,) they enter into conversation on the policy and constitution of the Cretans.

There is no prooemium nor introduction to the dialogue, as there is to most of Plato's writings. I speak of that kind of prooemium usual with Plato, which informs us often of the occasion and of the time of the dialogue, and of the characters of the persons introduced in it. In reality the entire four first books of "the Laws" are but introductory to the main subject, as he tells us himself in the end of the fourth book, p. 722.

BOOK I.

HEADS OF THE FIRST DIALOGUE.

P. 625. The institutions of Minos were principally directed to form the citizens to war. The great advantages of a people superior in military skill over the rest of mankind are stated. Every people is naturally in a state of war with its neighbours; even particular cities, nay, private families, are in a like situation within themselves, where the better and more rational part are always contending for that superiority which is their due, over the lower