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Plato. In his extant writings, Plato speaks so disparagingly of the art of Rhetoric, that we can hardly fancy his giving any encouragement to the study of it among his disciples. But none the less Aristotle appears to have diligently laboured in this, as in every other intellectual province that he found open. Plato would not separate Rhetoric from the rhetorical spirit; he regarded the whole thing as a procedure for tickling the ears, for flattering crowds, for subordinating truth to effect. Aristotle, in the analytical way which became one of his chief characteristics, separated the method of Rhetoric from the uses to which it might be applied. He saw that success in Rhetoric depended on general principles and laws of the human mind, and that it would be worth while to draw these out and frame them into a science, especially as many of his countrymen had already essayed to do the same, though imperfectly. He maintained that the study of the methods of Rhetoric was desirable and even necessary to a free citizen, for self-defence, for the exposure of sophistry, and in the interests of truth itself. Now, the greatest school of Rhetoric in all Greece was at this period held in Athens by the renowned Isocrates, who, when Aristotle arrived at Athens, was at the zenith of his reputation. He was now nearly seventy years old, but continued to teach and to compose with almost unabated vigour for twenty-eight years more. Isocrates had been the follower of Socrates, and several leading Sophists of the latter part of the fifth century B.C.—Protagoras, Prodicus, Gorgias, and Theramenes—are named as having been