ON A PASSAGE IN CRITO,'

WHEREIN SOCRATES REFUSES TO ESCAPE FROM PRISON AND DEATH, ALLEGING THAT A GOOD CITIZEN OUGHT TO OBEY HIS COUNTRY'S LAWS.

THE reply is simple.

Indeed, your city cannot subsist, because the laws are no longer of avail. For how can the laws be said to exist, when those who deserve to be nourished in the Prytanea at the public expense, are condemned to suffer the penalties only dne to the most atrocious criminals; whilst those against, and to protect from, whose injustice, the laws were framed, live in honour and security? I neither overthrow your state, nor infringe your laws. Although you have inflicted an injustice on me, which is sufficient, according to the opinions of the multitude, to authorize me to consider you and me as in a state of warfare; yet, had I the power, so far from inflicting any revenge, I would endeavour to overcome you by benefits. All that I do at present is, that which the peaceful traveller would do, who, caught by robbers in a forest, escapes from them whilst they are engaged in the division of the spoil. And this I do, when it would not only be

Mrs. Shelley published this Note in the Essays, Letters, &c.

(1840), with the other Platonic translations and notes.

indifferent, but delightful to me to die, surrounded by my friends, secure of the inheritance of glory, and escaping, after such a life as mine, from the decay of mind and body which must soon begin to be my portion should I live. But, I prefer the good, which I have it in my power yet to perform.

Such are the arguments, which overturn the sophism placed in the mouth of Socrates by Plato. But there are others which prove that he did well to die.

ON THE DÆMON OF SOCRATES.'

Socrates' dæmon a form of Augury.

Socrates made a distinction between things subject to divination and those not subject to it. He said a supernatural force has sway over the greatest things in all human undertakings (p. 5.) and that the uncertainty belonging to them all, is the introduction of that power, or rather that all events except those which the human will modifies, are modified by the divine will.

This is the memorandum referred to at p. 50 as being made among the Notes on Sculptures.

At the beginning is written, indistinctly, what seems to read thus,— Mem. on. L. I.

ON PROPHECY.

AN EXCERPT FROM THE TRACTATUS

THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS.

TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN OF SPINOZA.

[The following translation was printed in Middleton's Shelley and his Writings as an original work of the poet's, and assigned to the period of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, on "internal evidence"! Two pages of the MS. were reproduced in fac-simile: as far as I can judge from this, which is not well executed, the MS. seems to be of about the year 1815, or perhaps later. Middleton does not profess to give the whole fragment, which he describes as "too crude for publication entire"; but I suspect that, either as it stood, or in the way of quotation and paraphrase, he gave nearly all he had. Mr. Garnett subsequently identified this fragment as a translation from the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Mr. Rossetti (Poetical Works, 1878, Vol. I, page 150) records that, in March 1820, "Shelley was dictating to his wife a translation of Spinoza." From the part of Williams's journal published by Mr. Garnett in The Fortnightly Review for June 1878, we learn that, on the evening of the 11th of November 1821, Shelley proposed to Williams "to assist him in a continuation of the translation of Spinoza's Theologico-political tract, to which Lord B. has consented to put his name, and to give it greater currency, will write the life of that celebrated Jew to preface the work." On the 12th of November, Williams records, "S. and I commence Spinoza, that is to say, I write while he dictates. Write from page 178 to page 188." The following day's entry is "Write fifteen pages. S. talks of printing here"-and the record of the 14th is "Four and a half pages." Mr. Garnett says that "the abortive translation must have progressed at least as far as Spinoza's sixth definition "; but he does not lead us to suppose that the work is known to be extant. Perhaps the rest of it will be found some day; and it would certainly be well worth recovering.-H. B. F.]