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TWO:But it was not merely in the writings of professed philosophers that the new aspect of Platonism found expression. All great art embodies in one form or another the leading conceptions of its age; and the latter half of the seventeenth century found such a manifestation in the comedies of Moli��re. If these works stand at the head of French literature, they owe their position not more to their author��s brilliant wit than to his profound philosophy of life; or rather, we should say that with him wit and philosophy are one. The comic power of Shakespeare was shown by resolving the outward appearances of this world into a series of dissolving illusions. Like Spinoza and Malebranche, Moli��re turns the illusion in, showing what perverted opinions men form of themselves and others, through misconceptions and passions either of spontaneous growth or sedulously fostered by designing hands. Society, with him, seems almost entirely made up of pretenders and their dupes, both characters being not unfrequently combined in the same person, who is made a victim through his desire to pass for what he is not and cannot be. And this is what essentially distinguishes the art of Moli��re from the New Comedy of Athens, which he, like other moderns, had at first felt inclined to imitate until the success of the Pr��cieuses Ridicules showed him where his true opportunities lay. For the New Comedy was Aristotelian where it was not simply humanist; that is415 to say, it was an exhibition of types like those sketched by Aristotle��s disciple, Theophrastus, and already prefigured in the master��s own Ethics. These were the perennial forms in a world of infinite and perishing individual existences, not concealed behind phenomena, but incorporated in them and constituting their essential truth. The Old Comedy is something different again; it is pre-philosophic, and may be characterised as an attempt to describe great political interests and tendencies through the medium of myths and fables and familiar domesticities, just as the old theories of Nature, the old lessons of practical wisdom, and the first great national chronicles had been thrown into the same homely form.572Then as now, Judaism seems to have had a much greater attraction for women than for men; and this may be accounted218 for not only by the greater credulity of the female sex, which would equally predispose them in favour of every other new religion, but also by their natural sympathy with the domestic virtues which are such an amiable and interesting feature in the Jewish character. Josephus tells us that towards the beginning of Nero��s reign nearly all the women of Damascus were attached to Judaism;336 and he also mentions that Poppaea, the mistress and afterwards the wife of Nero, used her powerful influence for the protection of his compatriots, though whether she actually became a proselyte, as some have supposed, is doubtful.337 According to Ovid, the synagogues were much visited by Roman women, among others, apparently, by those of easy virtue, for he alludes to them as resorts which the man of pleasure in search of a conquest will find it advantageous to frequent.338