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system of life, is too often narrowed to petty objects, and which, from their fashion of conversing in streets and under porticos, and in public places, became a passion far more intense than with us. Among those who ministered exclusively to this taste, were the rhapsodists; and among rhapsodists, Ion himself tells us, he was the most eminent of his day; that he was a man of enthusiastic and poetic temperament, and abundantly gifted with the power of arranging his thoughts in glowing and fascinating language, his success proves. But he was singularly deficient in reason. When Socrates presses on him the question of, whether he as a rhapsodist is as well versed in nautical, hippodromic, and other arts, as sailors, charioteers, and various artisans ? he gives up the point with the most foolish inanity. One would fancy that practice in his pursuit would have caused him to reply, that though he was neither mariner nor horseman, nor practically skilled in any other of the pursuits in question, yet that he had consulted men versed in them; and enriching his mind with the knowledge afforded by adepts in all arts, he was better qualified by study and by his gift of language and enthusiasm to explain these, as they form a portion of Homer's poetry, than any individual whose knowledge was limited to one subject only. But Ion had no such scientific view of his profession. He gives up point after point, till, as Socrates observes, he most absurdly strives at victory, under the form of an expert leader of armies. In this, as in all the other of Plato's writings, we are perpetually referred, with regard to the enthusiastic and ideal portion of our intellect, to something above and beyond our sphere, the inspiration of the God-the influence exercised over the human mind, either through the direct agency of the

deities, or our own half-blind memory of divine knowledge acquired by the soul in its antenatal state. Shelley left Ion imperfect-I thought it better that it should appear as a whole-but at the same time have marked with brackets the passages that have been added; the rest appears exactly as Shelley left it.'

Respect for the name of Plato as well as that of Shelley, and reliance on the curiosity that the English reader must feel with regard to the sealed book of the Ancient Wonder, caused me to include in this volume the fragment of Menexenus, and passages from The Republic. In the first we have another admirable specimen of Socratic irony. In the latter the opinions and views of Plato enounced in The Republic, which appeared remarkable to Shelley, are preserved, with the addition, in some instances, of his own brief observations on them."

1 1 See note on this subject at p. 250.

THE BANQUET.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK OF PLATO.

[This happy task seems to have been undertaken in the early part of Shelley's residence in Italy. In a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne, dated "Bagni di Lucca, July 10th, 1818," he says, "I am employed just now, having little better to do, in translating into my faint and inefficient periods, the divine eloquence of Plato's Symposium; only as an exercise, or, perhaps, to give Mary some idea of the manners and feelings of the Athenians-so different on many subjects from that of any other community that ever existed. Writing to Godwin on the 25th of the same month, he says he has been constantly occupied in literature, but has written little except some translations of Plato, done "in despair of producing anything original." He specifies the Symposium as what he has been at work upon; and on the same date he writes to Peacock (Fraser's Magazine, March, 1860, page 302), "I have lately found myself totally incapable of original composition. I employed my mornings, therefore, in translating the Symposium, which I accomplished in ten days. Mary is now transcribing it, and I am writing a prefatory essay.” In 1821 this work was missing; and Shelley wrote to Medwin (Trelawny's Records of Shelley, &c., 1878, Vol. II, page 42), "I think you must have put up by mistake a MS. translation of the Symposium of Plato; if so, pray contrive to send it to me." On the 4th of July, 1822, he wrote to Mrs. Shelley from Pisa that he had "found the translation of the Symposium," presumably at Pisa.-H. B. F.]

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