Morally the purest, he affects to be the slave of passion and borrows the language even of the lewd to describe a love and a good-will far too exalted for the comprehension of his contemporaries.

This irony of his disarmed ridicule by anticipating it; it allayed jealousy and propitiated envy; and it possibly procured him admission into gay circles from which a more solemn teacher would have been excluded.

But all the time it had for its basis a real greatness of soul, a hearty and an unaffected disregard of public opinion, a perfect disinterestedness, and an entire abnegation of self.

He made himself a fool in order that fools by his folly might be made wise; he humbled himself to the level of those among whom his work lay that he might raise some few among them to his own level; he was all things to all men, if by any means he might save some.

Till Alcibiades ends the splendid eloge that Plato puts into his mouth with these words, "All my master's vice and stupidity and worship of wealthy and great men is counterfeit.