of a want of point in the dialogue and a general inferiority in the ideas, plan, manners, and style.  They miss the poetical flow, the dramatic verisimilitude, the life and variety of the characters, the dialectic subtlety, the Attic purity, the luminous order, the exquisite urbanity; instead of which they find tautology, obscurity, self-sufficiency, sermonizing, rhetorical declamation, pedantry, egotism, uncouth forms of sentences, and peculiarities in the use of words and idioms.  They are unable to discover any unity in the patched, irregular structure.  The speculative element both in government and education is superseded by a narrow economical or religious vein.  The grace and cheerfulness of Athenian life have disappeared; and a spirit of moroseness and religious intolerance has taken their place.  The charm of youth is no longer there; the mannerism of age makes itself unpleasantly felt.  The connection is often imperfect; and there is a want of arrangement, exhibited especially in the enumeration of the laws towards the end of the work.  The Laws are full of flaws and repetitions.  The Greek is in places very ungrammatical and intractable.  A cynical levity is displayed in some passages, and a tone of disappointment and lamentation over human things in others.  The critics seem also to observe in them bad imitations of thoughts which are better expressed in Plato’s other writings.  Lastly, they wonder how the mind which conceived the Republic could have left the Critias, Hermocrates, and Philosophus incomplete or unwritten, and have devoted the last years of life to the Laws.

The questions which have been thus indirectly suggested may be considered by us under five or six heads:  I, the characters; ii, the plan; iii, the style; IV, the imitations of other writings of Plato; V; the more general relation of the Laws to the Republic and the other dialogues; and vi, to the existing Athenian and Spartan states.

I. Already in the Philebus the distinctive character of Socrates has disappeared; and in the Timaeus, Sophist, and Statesman his function of chief speaker is handed over to the Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus, and to the Eleatic Stranger, at whose feet he sits, and is silent.  More and more Plato seems to have felt in his later writings that the character and method of Socrates were no longer suited to be the vehicle of his own philosophy.  He is no longer interrogative but dogmatic; not ’a hesitating enquirer,’ but one who speaks with the authority of a legislator.  Even in the Republic we have seen that the argument which is carried on by Socrates in the old style with Thrasymachus in the first book, soon passes into the form of exposition.  In the Laws he is nowhere mentioned.  Yet so completely in the tradition of antiquity is Socrates identified with Plato, that in the criticism of the Laws which we find in the so-called Politics of Aristotle he is supposed by the writer still to be playing his part of the chief speaker (compare Pol.).