Page:On the Sublime 1890.djvu/98

 

frenzy of language into an intemperate use of violent metaphors and inflated allegory. "It is not easy to remark" (be says in one place) "that a city ought to be blended like a bowl, in which the mad wine boils when it is poured out, but being disciplined by another and a sober god in that fair society produces a good and temperate drink.^[1] Really, it is said, to speak of water as a "sober god," and of the process of mixing as a "discipline," is to talk like a poet, and no very sober one either.8 It was such defects as these that the hostile critic^[2] Caecilius made his ground of attack, when he had the boldness in his essay "On the Beauties of Lysias" to pronounce that writer superior in every respect to Plato. Now Caecilius was doubly unqualified for a judge: he loved Lysias better even than himself, and at the same time his hatred of Plato and all his works is greater even than his love for Lysias. Moreover, he is so blind a partisan that his very premises are open to dispute. He vaunts Lysias as a faultless and immaculate writer, while Plato is, according to him, full of blemishes. Now this is not the case: far from it.

1. Legg. vi. 773, G
2. Reading ὁ μισῶν αὐτόν, by a conjecture of the translator.