The Dissertations of Maximus Tyrius

discover these abstruse particulars. But with respect to the rest of mankind, some it will fill with a contempt by no means elegant, and others with a lofty and arrogant hope that they shall now learn certain excellent things." Thus, with respect to these admirable men—the last and most legitimate of the followers of Plato—some, from being entirely ignorant of the abstruse dogmas Authoritative or established principles of belief. of Plato, and finding these interpreters full of conceptions which are by no means obvious to everyone in the writings of that philosopher, have immediately concluded that such conceptions are mere jargon and reverie, that they are not truly Platonic, and that they are nothing more than streams which, though originally derived from a pure fountain, have become polluted by distance from their source. Others, who pay attention to nothing but the most exquisite purity of language, look down with contempt upon every writer who lived after the fall of the Macedonian empire The empire established by Alexander the Great.; as if dignity and weight of sentiment were inseparable from splendid and accurate diction,