He may have been an honest man.

He was certainly a great man; and I feel a reverence, of which Mr Mitford seems to have no notion, for great men of every party.

But, when Mr Mitford says that the private character of Aeschines was without stain, does he remember what Aeschines has himself confessed in his speech against Timarchus?
I can make allowances, as well as Mr Mitford, for persons who lived under a different system of laws and morals; but let them be made impartially.

If Demosthenes is to be attacked on account of some childish improprieties, proved only by the assertion of an antagonist, what shall we say of those maturer vices which that antagonist has himself acknowledged?
"Against the private character of Aeschines," says Mr Mitford, "Demosthenes seems not to have had an insinuation to oppose." Has Mr Mitford ever read the speech of Demosthenes on the Embassy?
Or can he have forgotten, what was never forgotten by anyone else who ever read it, the story which Demosthenes relates with such terrible energy of language concerning the drunken brutality of his rival?
True or false, here is something more than an insinuation; and nothing can vindicate the historian, who has overlooked it, from the charge of negligence or of partiality.

But Aeschines denied the story.
And did not Demosthenes also deny the story respecting his childish nickname, which Mr Mitford has nevertheless told without any qualification?
But the judges, or some part of them, showed, by their clamour, their disbelief of the relation of Demosthenes.