philosophy to the study of which these great men devoted their lives, was
professedly delivered by its author in obscurity; that Aristotle himself
studied it for twenty years; and that it was no uncommon thing, as Plato
informs us in one of his Epistles, to find students unable to comprehend
its sublimest tenets even in a longer period than this,--when all these
circumstances are considered, what must we think of the arrogance, not to
say impudence, of men in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries, who have dared to calumniate these great masters of wisdom? Of
men, with whom the Greek is no native language; who have no such books to
consult as those had whom they revile; who have never thought, even in a
dream, of making the acquisition of wisdom the great object of their
life; and who in short have committed that most baneful error of
mistaking philology for philosophy, and words for things? When such as
these dare to defame men who may be justly ranked among the greatest and
wisest of the ancients, what else can be said than that they are the
legitimate descendants of the suitors of Penelope, whom, in the animated
language of Ulysses,

Laws or divine or human fail'd to move,
Or shame of men, or dread of gods above:
Heedless alike of infamy or praise,
Or Fame's eternal voice in future days,[21]

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[21] Pope's Odyssey, book xxii, v. 47, &c.
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But it is now time to present the reader with a general view of the works
of Plato, and, also to speak of the preambles, digressions, and style of
their author, and of the following translation. In accomplishing the