The old men are afraid of the ridicule which ’will fall on their heads more than enough,’ and they do not often indulge in a joke.  In one of the few which occur, the book of the Laws, if left incomplete, is compared to a monster wandering about without a head.  But we no longer breathe the atmosphere of humour which pervades the Symposium and the Euthydemus, in which we pass within a few sentences from the broadest Aristophanic joke to the subtlest refinement of wit and fancy; instead of this, in the Laws an impression of baldness and feebleness is often left upon our minds.  Some of the most amusing descriptions, as, for example, of children roaring for the first three years of life; or of the Athenians walking into the country with fighting-cocks under their arms; or of the slave doctor who knocks about his patients finely; and the gentleman doctor who courteously persuades them; or of the way of keeping order in the theatre, ‘by a hint from a stick,’ are narrated with a commonplace gravity; but where we find this sort of dry humour we shall not be far wrong in thinking that the writer intended to make us laugh.  The seriousness of age takes the place of the jollity of youth.  Life should have holidays and festivals; yet we rebuke ourselves when we laugh, and take our pleasures sadly.  The irony of the earlier dialogues, of which some traces occur in the tenth book, is replaced by a severity which hardly condescends to regard human things.  ’Let us say, if you please, that man is of some account, but I was speaking of him in comparison with God.’

The imagery and illustrations are poor in themselves, and are not assisted by the surrounding phraseology.  We have seen how in the Republic, and in the earlier dialogues, figures of speech such as ‘the wave,’ ‘the drone,’ ‘the chase,’ ‘the bride,’ appear and reappear at intervals.  Notes are struck which are repeated from time to time, as in a strain of music.  There is none of this subtle art in the Laws.  The illustrations, such as the two kinds of doctors, ‘the three kinds of funerals,’ the fear potion, the puppet, the painter leaving a successor to restore his picture, the ‘person stopping to consider where three ways meet,’ the ’old laws about water of which he will not divert the course,’ can hardly be said to do much credit to Plato’s invention.  The citations from the poets have lost that fanciful character which gave them their charm in the earlier dialogues.  We are tired of images taken from the arts of navigation, or archery, or weaving, or painting, or medicine, or music.  Yet the comparisons of life to a tragedy, or of the working of mind to the revolution of the self-moved, or of the aged parent to the image of a God dwelling in the house, or the reflection that ’man is made to be the plaything of God, and that this rightly considered is the best of him,’ have great beauty.