demons, but farther apart from them than demons were from the gods, and yet partaking of the angelical office, were heroes, or spirits clothed in a light ethereal body, and partaking still more of the soul of the world; perhaps the souls of men who had been heroical on earth, or sent down to embody them to that end. And lastly came the souls of men, which were the faintest emanation of the Deity, and clogged with earthly clothing in addition to the mundane nature of their spirits.*

The chiefs among these spiritual beings were very like the gods, and often mistaken for them, which is said to have given them great satisfaction. It is upon the strength of this fancy that attempts were made to account for the

izing Christian of the school of Alexandria. If so, there is no saying how far we are not indebted for our ordinary notions of angels themselves to Plato, nor indeed how far the Christian and Jewish angel and the demon of the Greeks are not one and the same spirit; for it is impossible to say how much of the Jewish Cabala is not Alexandrian. On the other hand, the Platonists of that city mixed up their dogmas with the Oriental philosophy, so that the angel comes round again to the East, and is traceable to Persia and India. Nothing of all this need shake him; for it is in the heart and hopes of man that his nest is found. Plato's angel, Pythagoras's, Philo's, Zoroaster's, and Jeremy Taylor's, are all the same spirit under different names; and those who would love him properly, must know as much, or they cannot. Henry Moore and others, who may be emphatically styled our angelical doctors, avowedly undertook to unite the Platonic, Pythagorean, and Cabalistic opinion. (See Enfield's Abridgment of Brucker.) It is true they derived them all from the Hebrew, which is about as much as if they had said that the Egyptians were skilled in all the learning of Moses, instead of Moses in all the learning of the Egyptians.

* Demons and heroes were the angels and saints of the Catholic hierarchy. They had their chapels, altars, feasts, and domestic worship precisely in the same spirit; and the souls of the departed were from time to time added to the list. (See the Abbé Banier's "Mythology and Fables of the Ancients," explained from history, vol. iii. p. 434.) The heroines were the female saints. We make this remark in no ironical spirit, though the Abbé would not thank us for it.

stories of the gods, and their freaks upon earth; for demons, any more than angels, were not incapable of a little aberration. The supposed visits, for instance, of Jupiter down to earth, when he came—

"Now, like a ram, fair Helle to pervert,

Now, like a bull, Europa to withdraw,"

were the work of those spirits about him, who may truly be called the jovial, and who delighted in bearing his name, as a Scottish clan does that of its chieftain. We have already mentioned the pious indignation of Plutarch at the indiscreet tales of the poets. It is remarkable that, according to Plato, these satellites encircled their master precisely in the manner of the angelical hierarchies. "But how different," it may be said, "were their natures!" Not, perhaps, quite so much so as may be fancied. We have already hinted a resemblance in one point; and, in others, the advantage has not always been kept on the proper side. Milton's angels, when they let down the unascendable, heavenly staircase to imbitter the agonies of Satan, did a worse thing than any recorded of the Jupiters and Apollos. We must be cautious how, in attributing one or two virtues to a set of beings, we think we endow them with all the rest.

men.

Demons were not, as some thought them, the souls of The latter had the honor of assisting demons, but were a separate class. Indeed, according to Plato, the word soul might as well have been put for man, in opposition to spirit; for he held that the human being was properly a soul, using the body only as an instrument. Nor was this soul the guardian angel or demon, though sometimes called a demon by reason of its superiority, but man himself. It was immortal, pre-existent; and the object

of virtue was to restore it to its former state of beatitude in certain regions of light, from which it had fallen. This, among other doctrines of Plato, has been a favorite one with the poets, and would appear to have been seriously entertained by one of the present day.* What difficulty it clears, or what trouble it takes away, we cannot see. Progression is surely a better doctrine than recovery; especially if we look upon evil as partial, fugitive, and convertible, like a hard substance, to good. Besides, we should take the whole of our species with us, and not always be looking after our own lost perfections.

The guardian demons assigned to man, came out of the whole of these orders indiscriminately. Their rank was proportioned to the virtue and intelligence of the individual. Plotinus and others had guardian demons of a very high order. The demon of Socrates is said to have been called a god, because it was of the order that were taken for gods. It was the business of this spiritual attendant to be a kind of soul in addition. The soul, or real man, governed the animal part of us; and the demon governed the soul. He was a tutor accompanying the pupil. If the pupil did amiss, it was not the tutor's fault. He lamented, and tried to mend it, perhaps, by subjecting it to some misery, or even vice. The process in this case is not very clear. Good demons appear sometimes to be distinct from bad ones, sometimes to be confounded with them. The vulgar supposed, with the Jesuit who wrote the "Pantheon," that every person had two demons assigned to him one a good demon who incited him to virtue; the other a bad one, who prompted him "to all manner of vice

"Our life is but a dream and a forgetting."

WORDSWORTH.

and wickedness."* But the benign logic of Plato rejected a useless malignity. Evil when it came, was supposed to be for a good purpose: or rather not being of a nature to be immediately got rid of, was turned to good account; and man was ultimately the better for it. The demon did every thing he could to exalt the intellect of his charge, to regulate his passions, and perfect his nature throughout; in short, to teach his soul, as the soul aspired to teach the body; and what is remarkable, though he could not supply fate itself, he is said to have supplied things fortuitous; that is to say, "to give us a chance,” as we phrase it, and put us in the way of shaping what we were to suppose was rough-hewn. This was reversing the Shakespearian order of Providence, or rather, perhaps, giving it a new meaning; for we, or the untaught part of us, and fate, might be supposed to go blindly to the same end, did not our intelligence keep on the alert.

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.†

*See the "Pantheon" attributed to Mr. Tooke.

Tooke's "Pantheon " is

a rifacimento of King's "Pantheon," which was a translation from a Jesuit of the name of Pomey. It contains "in every page, an elaborate calumny," says Mr. Baldwin, "upon the gods of the Greeks, and that in the coarsest thoughts and words that taverns could furnish. The author seems continually haunted by the fear that his pupil might prefer the religion of Jupiter to the religion of Christ.” — Baldwin's "Pantheon," preface, p. 5. This philosophi

cal mythologist is of opinion that there was no ground for fear of that sort. We have observed elsewhere how little the young readers of Tooke think of the abuse at all; but if they had any sense of it, undoubtedly it goes in Jupiter's favor. We believe there is one thing which is not lost upon them, and that is, the affected horror and secret delight with which the Jesuit dwells upon certain vagaries of the gayer deities. Besides, he paints sometimes in good, admiring earnest; and then the boys attend to him as gravely. See, for instance, the beginning of his chapter on Venus, which, if we read once at school, we read a thousand times, comparing it with the engraving.

† See Taylor's and Sydenham's "Translations of Plato," vol. i. p. 16, and vol. ii. p. 308.

If all this is not much clearer than attempts to explain such matters are apt to be, and if the parts of Plato's theology (which were derived from the national creed) do little honor sometimes to the general spirit of it, which was his own; there is something at all times extremely elevating in his aspirations after the good and beautiful. St. Augustin complained that the reading of Plato made him proud. We do believe that it is impossible for readers of any enthusiasm to sit long over some of his writings (the Banquet for instance) and not feel an unusual exaltation of spirit, a love of the good and beautiful, for their own sakes, and in honor of human nature. But there is no danger, we conceive, provided we correct this poetical state of self-aspiration with a remembrance of the admonitions of Christianity, — the sympathy with our fellowcreatures. The more hope we have of ourselves under that correction, the more we shall have of others.

The great point is to elevate ourselves by elevating humanity at large.

It is difficult to know what to make of the demon of Socrates. It is clear that he laid claim to a special consciousness of this attendant spirit—a sort of revelation, that we believe had never before been vouchsafed. The spirit gave him intimations rather what to avoid than to do; for the Platonists tell us, that Socrates was led by his own nature to do what was right; but out of the fervor of his desire to do it, was liable to be mistaken in the season. For instance, he had a tendency to give the benefit of his wisdom to all men indiscriminately; and here the demon would sometimes warn him off, that he might not waste his philosophy upon a fool. This was at least an ingenious and mortifying satire. But the spirit interfered also on occasions that seem very trifling, though accord