IT is not without mature reflection that I leave this introduction to stand in the main as it was originally written; for it does not seem to me good to extinguish in a later edition all traces of how circumspectly, and turning every thing to the best, I have gone to work with those dialogues ascribed to Plato which appeared to me at first suspicious, that my method of proceeding might be the less liable to be confounded, by attentive readers at least, with a frivolous and precipitate criticism coming in after the thing was decided upon. As for the rest, every reader who compares the annotations with the introduction will remark that I give more space to the grounds of suspicion than to the defence, which last however I thought it incumbent upon me to investigate in the case of a work which, with all its weaknesses, is not entirely without a Platonic tone; and even now I refrain from cancelling that defence, as it may pave the way towards explaining what is unquestionably Platonic in detail, supposing the work itself to be condemned as not genuine. But Bekker marks this and the following dialogues more decisively as ungenuine, and, in so doing, has my full assent.