Page:Crotchet Castle - Peacock (1831).djvu/146

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
134
CROTCHET CASTLE.

Uranian Venus; and I say, sir, that figure realizes the finest imaginings of Plato, and is the personification of the most refined and exalted feeling of which the human mind is susceptible; the love of pure, ideal, intellectual beauty.

THE REV. DR. FOLLIOTT.

I am aware, sir, that Plato, in his Symposium, discourseth very eloquently touching the Uranian and Pandemian Venus: but you must remember that, in our Universities, Plato is held to be little better than a misleader of youth; and they have shewn their contempt for him, not only by never reading him, (a mode of contempt in which they deal very largely,) but even by never printing a complete edition of him; although they have printed many ancient books, which nobody suspects to have been ever read on the spot, except by a person attached to the