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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: cealed from view. He absorbs the whole mind of those who gain his intimacy. There is a glory about his ideas, as about the heads of the apostles, which appears to be brightly reflected from our own fancy as we read, and to transform us into something like his resemblance. We feel ourselves in presence of the beautiful; it descends around us like a shower, but a shower that warms and fructifies, and clothes even the most barren and stony places of the soul with verdure. Hence the power and the charm of Plato. He possesses art in perfection, but possesses along with it something which transcends all art, and operates like an eternal source ef energy upon whomsoever approaches him. These qualities, which characterize all his genuine remains, are nowhere more visible than in the Republic, which, as I have already remarked, excited in Sir Thomas More the wish to frame in imitation of it an ideal state, perfect in laws and manners, and more adapted to the notions and wants of the age in which he lived. Properly to comprehend the modern work, therefore, it will be necessary to form something like a just conception of the ancient one, which has served as the antitype not merely of the Utopia, but of the Panchaia ofEuhemeros, the City of the Sun of Campanella, the New Atlantis of Lord Bacon, the Gaudentio di Lucca, attributed to Bishop Berkeley, the Oceana of Harrington,' and a host of similar productions less renowned. 1 Gcettling, Pref. ad. Aristot. Polit. p. xii attributes to Harris the Oceana of Harrington, which, therefore, he had never readIn his countryman Buhle's History of Modern Philosophy, t. iv. pp. 424?448, he might, however, have discovered not only the real author of the work, but a very full and able analysis of its contents. But the reader must b...

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