25 JUNE 1927, Page 26

SOCRATES AMONG HIS PEERS. Three Dialogues by Owen Grazebrook. (Kegan

Paul. 6s.)-By far the best of these three dialogues is the first, and in Night and the Dream" Mr. Grazebrook attains real distinction both in his presentation of the Platonic manner and in the imagination with which he weaves the Socratic fable of the man who returned to life, and related his experiences in the working out of the Law of which hitherto he had been unconscious though always in its jurisdiction. Phrases familiar to us from the Christian revelation are so skilfully used as to give no effect of anachronism, and the soul's passage from darkness into the new light is admirably gradated. Mr. Grazebrook has chosen an ambitious format, for he casts his dialogue in the mould of Plato's Symposium, even introducing Agathon as the giver of the feast and Aristophanes among the guests. But can he be right in making Agathon, during Socrates's life-time, a very old man ? It was Agathon who was the host in the Symposium to celebrate his first prize-winning for a play, when Socrates, as we know from the allusion to the battle of Delium, was middle-aged, and Agathon still a young man.