| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Royalty Restored/London Under Charles II by J. Fitzgerald Molloy: house did not throw open its doors to a brilliant throng of
guests; few nights grew to dawn that the vicinities of St.
James's and Covent Garden were not made brilliant by the torches
of those accompanying revellers to their homes. The fashionable
hour for dinner was three of the clock, and for greater
satisfaction of guests it now became the mode to entertain them
after that meal with performances of mountebanks and musicians,
Various diaries inform us of this custom. When my Lord Arlington
had bidden his friends to a feast, he subsequently diverted them
by the tricks of a fellow who swallowed a knife in a horn sheath,
together with several pebbles, which he made rattle in his
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: fit of abstraction occurring when he was serving with the army at Potidaea;
like (4) the drinking powers of Socrates and his love of the fair, which
receive a similar attestation in the concluding scene; or the attachment of
Aristodemus, who is not forgotten when Socrates takes his departure. (5)
We may notice the manner in which Socrates himself regards the first five
speeches, not as true, but as fanciful and exaggerated encomiums of the god
Love; (6) the satirical character of them, shown especially in the appeals
to mythology, in the reasons which are given by Zeus for reconstructing the
frame of man, or by the Boeotians and Eleans for encouraging male loves;
(7) the ruling passion of Socrates for dialectics, who will argue with
Agathon instead of making a speech, and will only speak at all upon the
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