for this reason is prohibited by Mahometans, as well as of late years by many Christians, no less than by the ancient Spartans; and to sound its praises seriously seems to partake of the nature of a paradox.  But we may rejoin with Plato that the abuse of a good thing does not take away the use of it.  Total abstinence, as we often say, is not the best rule, but moderate indulgence; and it is probably true that a temperate use of wine may contribute some elements of character to social life which we can ill afford to lose.  It draws men out of their reserve; it helps them to forget themselves and to appear as they by nature are when not on their guard, and therefore to make them more human and greater friends to their fellow-men.  It gives them a new experience; it teaches them to combine self-control with a measure of indulgence; it may sometimes restore to them the simplicity of childhood.  We entirely agree with Plato in forbidding the use of wine to the young; but when we are of mature age there are occasions on which we derive refreshment and strength from moderate potations.  It is well to make abstinence the rule, but the rule may sometimes admit of an exception.  We are in a higher, as well as in a lower sense, the better for the use of wine.  The question runs up into wider ones—­What is the general effect of asceticism on human nature? and, Must there not be a certain proportion between the aspirations of man and his powers?—­questions which have been often discussed both by ancient and modern philosophers.  So by comparing things old and new we may sometimes help to realize to ourselves the meaning of Plato in the altered circumstances of our own life.

Like the importance which he attaches to festive entertainments, his depreciation of courage to the fourth place in the scale of virtue appears to be somewhat rhetorical and exaggerated.  But he is speaking of courage in the lower sense of the term, not as including loyalty or temperance.  He does not insist in this passage, as in the Protagoras, on the unity of the virtues; or, as in the Laches, on the identity of wisdom and courage.  But he says that they all depend upon their leader mind, and that, out of the union of wisdom and temperance with courage, springs justice.  Elsewhere he is disposed to regard temperance rather as a condition of all virtue than as a particular virtue.  He generalizes temperance, as in the Republic he generalizes justice.  The nature of the virtues is to run up into one another, and in many passages Plato makes but a faint effort to distinguish them.  He still quotes the poets, somewhat enlarging, as his manner is, or playing with their meaning.  The martial poet Tyrtaeus, and the oligarch Theognis, furnish him with happy illustrations of the two sorts of courage.  The fear of fear, the division of goods into human and divine, the acknowledgment that peace and reconciliation are better than the appeal to the sword, the analysis of temperance into resistance