Demosthenes: an Encomium (21-25)

‘Or if you prefer his character, or his policy, it will be well to isolate some particular detail—if you are greedy you may pick out two or three—which will give you quite enough to go upon; so great was he at every point. And for such specializing we

When Thersagoras had finished this harangue, I remarked

'You have been prescribing for the troubles that would attend a first attempt; unfortunately it is years and years since I got through that stage, and your remedies are quite out of date.’ ‘Why, then,’ he exclaimed, ‘the cure is complete; nobody is nervous about a road of which he knows every inch.’

‘Ah, but then I have set my heart upon reversing the feat that Anniceris of Cyrene exhibited to Plato and his friends. To show what a fine driver he was, he drove round the Academy time after time exactly in his own track, which looked after it as if it had only been traversed once. Now my endeavour is just the opposite, to avoid my old tracks; and it is by no means

‘Pauson the painter was commissioned to do a horse rolling. He painted one galloping in a cloud of dust. As he was at work upon it, his patron came in, and complained that this was not what he had ordered. Pauson just turned the picture upside down and told his man to hold it so for inspection; there was the horse rolling on its back.? ‘You dear innocent!’ I said, ‘do you suppose I have kept my picture turned the same way all these years? It has been shifted and tilted at every conceivable angle, till I begin to have apprehensions of ending like Proteus.’ ‘And how was that?’ ‘Oh, I mean the issue of his attempts to evade human observation; when he had exhausted all shapes of animals and plants and elements, finding no metamorphosis left him, he had to be Proteus again.’

‘You have more shifts than ever Proteus had,’ he said, ‘to get off hearing my poem.’