ment of public business; and as their education too commonly unfits them for comprehending the nature of that business, their interference is, for the most part, productive of very mischievous results.

To wave this disquisition, let me advert briefly to the form of the commonwealth, which in many of its regulations, is exactly conformable to nature. Having divided the mental powers of man into reason, irritability, and desire, he makes a corresponding division of the population of his state into three classes-the magistrates, the military, and the populace; the first governed by calm wisdom, the second by the angry passions, under the guidance of reason, the third by the feelings of the moment, whatever they may be. He could not conceive the possibility of communicating the lessons of philosophy to the multitude; nor could any other man, until those lessons were embodied by Christianity in a brief moral code, comprehensible to all men, whose injunctions and prohibitions come sanctioned, moreover, by the authority of the Almighty. The condition of the common people, therefore, has been altered by Christianity. From a gross and sensual throng, they may, where the other classes do their duty, be converted into masses manageable by reason, open to the influences of religion, inspired with the enlightened love of country; and although in themselves incapable, as a body, of exercising the functions of government, by no means precluded from furnishing from among their own ranks, both wise legislators and able commanders.

Plato's magistrates were to be chosen from the military caste, upon principles which could not fail to give satisfaction to the most democratic of mankind. Virtue and wisdom were their sole titles to nobility and rule. They were to be chosen to govern, because nature, by bestowing on them the capacity, had evidently designed them for it; not because their acres were numerous, or their purses well filled. Education, too, was to concur in enlarging, strengthening, and polishing their minds; and philosophy and religion, those two most consummate teachers of happiness, were through life to be their counsellors, supporters, and guides. state so governed would be under the immediate direction and control of nature. Virtue, which is but the health of the soul, would become the general habit of the community; contention and violence would be unknown; misery would cease; and the Golden Age, feigned by the poets, would be called into a real existence upon earth.

A

Every one has heard it was the opinion of Plato, that nations would never be well governed or happy, until kings should be philosophers, or philosophers kings. Experience has taught mankind a different lesson. Philosophers are now employed in discovering how, in order to be happy, mankind may deliver themselves from their kings, which, after so many ages of useless toil and experiment, is the only hope they have left. However, it is in the "Republic" that he expresses that opinion; and the reader who is at the pains to examine, that while making use of the term king,

Plato by no means intended what we understand by it, but something extremely different-as different, in fact, as virtue is from vice. His notions of a philosopher, too, differed very materially from those which prevail in our day. He did not understand by it a man who stands all day at the tail of a pair of bellows in a laboratory, with sooty face and hands begrimed with charcoal, watching the results of a chemical experiment. Such a person he would have considered a highly useful servant of philosophy, but would have found for him a name altogether different from that of philosopher. Nor did he intend by the term a botanist, a natural historian, or an astronomer. Even the logician, who reasons subtly, and sophist, who understands something of everything, and on any given question can discourse a full hour by Shrewsbury clock, would by no means have come up to Plato's conception of a philosopher. He bestowed the name on those, and those only, who have arrived by meditation at the knowledge of eternal truth; who, smitten by the beauty of virtue, not only love and admire it, but pursue it with all their soul and with all their strength, who nourish it, who exercise it, who put their whole trust in it; and who, in proportion to the loftiness and perfection of their theoretical wisdom, are versed likewise in practice and experience, and in all the arts which lead to private virtue and public felicity.9

9 Conf. Stallbaum De Argument. et Consil, &c. i. 36. Morgenstern, p. 202-212. De Geer. Diatr. de Polit. Plat. Princip. p. 164-175. with Books vi. and vii. of the Republic, passim.

It has been observed above, that Plato divides the powers of the mind into three, and that in his ideal state were three classes of men corresponding to that division of the mental faculties. Following out the idea that a commonwealth is but a compound entity, bearing a strict analogy to an individual man, he considers the excellence of a perfect polity to be of the same nature with that of a good citizen. For the perfection of a state consists in the prevalence of our forms of virtue-wisdom, the distinguishing quality of those rulers and magistrates, who consult and deliberate on whatever concerns the happiness and prosperity of the people; fortitude, which must exist in the military caste, who, under the direction of the magistrates, protect the rights and interests of the community; temperance, which constrains the multitude to yield obedience to their rulers, and live in peace and harmony with each other; and, lastly, justice, which prevails when the citizens not only are united by a kind of brotherly love, but cheerfully perform each class their several duties, whereby all the minor virtues, both public and private, are strengthened and preserved.10

Having explained and described the several excellences of a state, which, as I have observed, are in his view identical with those of the individual, he proceeds to develope the corruptions and perversions of government, which likewise correspond exactly with various modifications of human de

10 De Repub. iv. 427 e.—435 a.

pravity. His ideas on this part of the subject deserve the deepest attention, particularly from those who, as legislators or statesmen, may by wisdom exalt their country to the pinnacle of political prosperity, or plunge it by inexperience and ignorance into the depths of misery. Here, in fact, are found the germs of those magnificent political theories afterwards brought forward more systematically by Aristotle, Cicero, and Montesquieu; and perhaps Bentham himself, whose unpoetical mind offers the completest contrast to that of Plato, was not wholly unindebted to this portion of the Republic. At any rate, they who prefer profiting by profound speculations to the pleasure of dwelling upon a few casual errors, snatched up and borne along by the mind in its loftiest flights, as straws, and leaves, and other worthless things are by the whirlwind, may here refresh, enlarge, and invigorate their understandings, by the contemplation of ideas exquisitely original, of theories sublime and daring beyond belief, of eloquence invested with a splendour, a brightness, and a power nowhere surpassed, but of which the English reader may obtain some idea in the pages of that "holiest of men," to whom we owe the "Paradise Lost" and the "Defensio pro Populo Anglicano."

To proceed there is no form of government which has not by nature a strong and almost necessary tendency to degenerate into another political system, which may be regarded as its perversion; for even the most perfect shape which a commonwealth can assume, in Plato's language an Aris