Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/181

BEN JONSON 165 to Plato and Aristotle and the other wise men of antiquity. Homer nods, and forgets the save-all; Shakespeare also nods, say over a pipe, and forgets the very pipe over which he is nodding. And here I may observe, with profound regret, that it is not only in literature that the greatest men are thus fallible. To take but one capital instance, it has been argued that Socrates himself was but a lazy old loafer who went bumming around at Athens, gossiping about anything and everything with any- body he could get to gossip with him, and pretending that this desultory chit-chat was philosophy ; picking up loose young swells like Alcibiades, and sponging on them for dinners, after which he was quite ready to stay drinking all night, as we read in the " Banquet." As to his guardian genius, about whom or which so much grandiose nonsense has been scribbled, these avvocati del diavolo allege his own description of the influence in that last dying speech and confession, the " Apology " : " This began with me from child- hood, being a kind of voice which, when present, always diverts me from what I am about to do, but never urges me on." Whence they argue, with cruel exultation, that it must be self-evident to every im- partial reader (whose intellects have not been be- wildered by the obscure intricacies of the catacombs, wherein the mummies of dead languages have lain mouldering for millenniums) that this renowned Agathodaemon was neither more nor less than su- preme vagrant indolence ! It has been further argued (I shudder in writing it) that in our days he would have been prosecuted for neglecting his poor wife and children (as he also confesses in the