I have felt ever since that the title of Platonist belongs by far better right to those who have been nourished in and have endeavoured to practise Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the least intelligible of his works, and which the character of his mind and writings makes it uncertain whether he himself regarded as anything more than poetic fancies, or philosophic conjectures.
In going through Plato and Demosthenes, since I could now read these authors, as far as the language was concerned, with perfect ease, I was not required to construe them sentence by sentence, but to read them aloud to my father, answering questions when asked: but the particular attention which he paid to elocution (in which his own excellence was remarkable) made this reading aloud to him a most painful task.

Of all things which he required me to do, there was none which I did so constantly ill, or in which he so perpetually lost his temper with me.

He had thought much on the principles of the art of reading, especially the most neglected part of it, the inflections of the voice, or _modulation_, as writers on elocution call it (in contrast with _articulation_ on the one side, and _expression_ on the other), and had reduced it to rules, grounded on the logical analysis of a sentence.

These rules he strongly impressed upon me, and took me severely to task for every violation of them: but I even then remarked (though I did not venture to make the remark to him) that though he reproached me when I read a sentence ill, and _told_ me how I ought to have read it, he never by reading it himself, _showed_ me how it ought to be read.

A defect running through his otherwise admirable modes of instruction, as it did through all his modes of thought, was that of trusting too much to the intelligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied in the concrete.