Excerpt from The Clouds of Aristophanes: With Notes Critical and Explanatory, Adapted to the Use of Schools and Universities
Having entered fully in another a place into general nature of Grecian philosophy, and more particularly the character of Socrates, we shall not add to the size of a volume already sufficiently large by going over ground already trodden, but content ourselves with throwing together such few remarks, as may serve to explain under what feelings and with what conceptions a great part of the notes appended to this play has been framed, and also shew under what points of view the drama itself may be most safely proposed to the consideration of younger minds.
As the schools of ancient philosophy had generally their outer and their inner doctrines, so there was doubtless in that singular person, with whom the greatest of those schools originated, an outer and an inner Socrates. Whether the inner Socrates ever developed himself to that full extent of moral and intellectual grandeur, in which the pages of Xenophon and Plato have exhibited him, - who perhaps drew rather an ideal than a real character, - we shall not here stop to inquire: of the outer Socrates, in all his eccentricities of dress and manner, in many of his peculiar doctrines, as well as in the peculiar phraseology and modes of illustration in which those doctrines were expounded and enforced, we may rest assured that we have here a copy done to the very life; and if the reader finds himself laughing heartily over that copy, he may also rest assured that he does not laugh more heartily than did the son of Sophroniscus himself.
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