The history of the British reception of Plato is often written as if the eighteenth century were a vast wasteland, a sort of flyover country between the interesting territories of Cambridge Platonism (a seventeenth-century phenomenon) and the Romantic revival of Plato (a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century movement).² The eighteenth century, in fact, is of interest in itself, both for its approaches to Plato, particularly for its gradual separation of Plato from Socrates, and for the way it explains the differences between the seventeenth- and nineteenth- century Platos.