of pleasure as well as endurance of pain, the distinction between the education which is suitable for a trade or profession, and for the whole of life, are important and probably new ethical conceptions.  Nor has Plato forgotten his old paradox (Gorgias) that to be punished is better than to be unpunished, when he says, that to the bad man death is the only mitigation of his evil.  He is not less ideal in many passages of the Laws than in the Gorgias or Republic.  But his wings are heavy, and he is unequal to any sustained flight.

There is more attempt at dramatic effect in the first book than in the later parts of the work.  The outburst of martial spirit in the Lacedaemonian, ‘O best of men’; the protest which the Cretan makes against the supposed insult to his lawgiver; the cordial acknowledgment on the part of both of them that laws should not be discussed publicly by those who live under their rule; the difficulty which they alike experience in following the speculations of the Athenian, are highly characteristic.

In the second book, Plato pursues further his notion of educating by a right use of pleasure.  He begins by conceiving an endless power of youthful life, which is to be reduced to rule and measure by harmony and rhythm.  Men differ from the lower animals in that they are capable of musical discipline.  But music, like all art, must be truly imitative, and imitative of what is true and good.  Art and morality agree in rejecting pleasure as the criterion of good.  True art is inseparable from the highest and most ennobling ideas.  Plato only recognizes the identity of pleasure and good when the pleasure is of the higher kind.  He is the enemy of ‘songs without words,’ which he supposes to have some confusing or enervating effect on the mind of the hearer; and he is also opposed to the modern degeneracy of the drama, which he would probably have illustrated, like Aristophanes, from Euripides and Agathon.  From this passage may be gathered a more perfect conception of art than from any other of Plato’s writings.  He understands that art is at once imitative and ideal, an exact representation of truth, and also a representation of the highest truth.  The same double view of art may be gathered from a comparison of the third and tenth books of the Republic, but is here more clearly and pointedly expressed.

We are inclined to suspect that both here and in the Republic Plato exaggerates the influence really exercised by the song and the dance.  But we must remember also the susceptible nature of the Greek, and the perfection to which these arts were carried by him.  Further, the music had a sacred and Pythagorean character; the dance too was part of a religious festival.  And only at such festivals the sexes mingled in public, and the youths passed under the eyes of their elders.