dialogue and the continuous discourse of Plato as between the narrative
and speeches of Thucydides.

3. The perfection of style is variety in unity, freedom, ease, clearness,
the power of saying anything, and of striking any note in the scale of
human feelings without impropriety; and such is the divine gift of
language possessed by Plato in the Symposium and Phaedrus. From this there
are many fallings-off in the Laws: first, in the structure of the
sentences, which are rhythmical and monotonous,--the formal and
sophistical manner of the age is superseding the natural genius of Plato:
secondly, many of them are of enormous length, and the latter end often
forgets the beginning of them,--they seem never to have received the
second thoughts of the author; either the emphasis is wrongly placed, or
there is a want of point in a clause; or an absolute case occurs which is
not properly separated from the rest of the sentence; or words are
aggregated in a manner which fails to show their relation to one another;
or the connecting particles are omitted at the beginning of sentences; the
uses of the relative and antecedent are more indistinct, the changes of
person and number more frequent, examples of pleonasm, tautology, and
periphrasis, antitheses of positive and negative, false emphasis, and
other affectations, are more numerous than in the other writings of Plato;
there is also a more common and sometimes unmeaning use of qualifying
formulae, os epos eipein, kata dunamin, and of double expressions, pante
pantos, oudame oudamos, opos kai ope--these are too numerous to be
attributed to errors in the text; again, there is an over-curious
adjustment of verb and participle, noun and epithet, and other artificial
forms of cadence and expression take the place of natural variety:
thirdly, the absence of metaphorical language is remarkable--the style is
not devoid of ornament, but the ornament is of a debased rhetorical kind,
patched on to instead of growing out of the subject; there is a great