Excerpt from History of the Life of William Gilpin: A Character Study Plato, in the universality of his genius, appears to every age and every individual as of his own time and place. He had so absorbed all knowledge that in the annals of men one epoch was the same to him as an other. All that the world before him had known he knew. He went to Italy to hear Pythagoras, but left more than he brought away; and but For the prema ture hemlock he would have been teaching his master Socrates. Nor was the past alone open to him; he made the present and the future his own. His genius swept over all the earth, penetrated the eternal hills, and played with the stars. All science, all philosophy, all history were his. We have as yet no American Athens, though there have been pretensions advanced in that direction; if located in the heart of the continent, Denver might present strong claims to the distinction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.