Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing Inst of gold:
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
In the sense of which last line Mr. Kingsley's theology is devoutly millennarian.
"Phaethon” is a dialogue within a dialogue, the outer case being by far the more interesting and valuable of the two. Dialogue No. 1 is conducted by the author and his friend Templeton, once his Cambridge chum, and now a Herefordshire squire, blest with substantial acres, and a sweet [but] Low Church wife; and the theme of their converse is the doctrines, if doctrines they may be called, of Emerson and his freyschützen brethren, transatlantic and cisatlantic. Dialogue No. 2 has for its great gun Socrates himself, and for minor canon, Alcibiades, and eke Phaethon (so that our use of the term dialogue is, numerically speaking, a solecism). These "auld-warld" worthies discuss the right of private judgment, and of public expression of it, in a somewhat neo-platonie method and accent. This No. 2 is supposed to be introduced by Mr. Kingsley in the course of No. 1, as the product of the previous night, with the design of convicting Templeton’s American visitor, a certain Professor Windrush (already known in "Alton Locke") of illogical, unreasonable, and indefensible sophistries. In perusing controversial fiction, one always suffers, more or less (according to the ability, or candour, or both united, of the fictor), from an uneasy consciousness that the whole thing: is one-sided, and that full justiee cannot be done to the losing side, simply because it is predestined to lose. ‘Thus the dialogue by right becomes a monologue by fact—the logic merges in a sort of rhetorical hendiadys. One feels this in reading Plato himself. One of our most distinguished Greek scholars protests against the "disagreeable form of composition" adopted by Plato and Xenophon, on this very ground. "It is always Socrates and Crito, or Socrates and Phædrus, or Socrates and Isehomachus; in fact, Socrates and some man of straw or good-humoured nine-pin, set up to be bowled down as a matter of course. How inevitably the reader feels his fingers itching to take up the cudgels instead of Crito for one ten minutes! Had we been favoured with an interview, we can answer for it that the philosopher should not have had it all his own way."[1] And in reading Mr. Kingsley's performances, "something too much of this" same feeling pervades the mind—a mis-
- ↑ The same critic—and there is no mistaking his style—owns to a "sneaking hatred" to the entire Domus Socratica—viz., to the old gentleman himself, the founder of the concern, and his two apprentices, Plato and Xenophon, this hatred being founded chiefly in the intense feeling he entertains that "all three were humbugs." He contends, that so hard a matter would it be found at Nisi Prius to extract any verdict as to what constituted the true staple of the Socratic philosophy, that any jury, rash enough to undertake the question, would finally be carted to the bounds of the county, and shot into the adjacent county like a ton of coals. The divine right of Piato has met with at least two eminent nonconformists amongst us, in Mr. de Quincey and Mr. W. S, Landor.
