to others the circumstantial detail of their toils and their achievements." Tried by his own standard, placed among those whom he reckons as his peers, we think Plutarch stands pre-eminent. And such has been the verdict of mankind. His Lives were among the most popular works of his own day. The historians, philosophers, and grammarians of subsequent ages bear testimony to his singular merit. He was a special favourite with the Greek and Latin fathers. When the Greek and Latin languages gave place to those of modern Europe, Plutarch was one of the first classic authors brought out of the cloisters of the learned, and translated for the benefit of the people; and from that day to this, no book has been more universally popular, none more widely diffused in different tongues and distant lands, none sought after with more avidity by the young and the old, in the infancy and the maturity of nations, than Plutarch's Lives. It was translated into French in the reign of Henry II., and from the French translated again into English in the time of Queen Elizabeth. It is generally supposed that this English Plutarch furnished the materials for those immortal plays of Shakspeare which dramatize classical subjects. And the unlettered not only of Shakspeare's countrymen, but of other European nations, are indebted, directly or indirectly, to Plutarch for the better part of their knowledge of ancient heroes and sages. Ancient history, as written for the people in modern times, makes principal use of those facts which he narrates, and presents them in the same striking and popular light in which he clothed them. Indeed, so effectually has he been translated and transfused into the common mind, that if all which has been derived from him were subtracted from the now current popular notions touching the great men of antiquity, the larger, and by far the more interesting part, would be swept into oblivion, and an appalling blank would be created, not only in the memories, but in the imaginations and the hearts of men. Like the marvellous incidents and the moral lessons of Ulysses' story-the speciosa miracula, as Horace calls them, of the Odyssey-Plutarch's heroes and their achievements have become familiar as household words throughout the civilized world. They are worshipped as a kind of household gods that have survived the general wreck of paganism, and planted their altars on the hearths of Christendom. They are incorporated with the hallowed memories, the sacred associations, the common inheritances, the daily thoughts and lives, of the great human family. Children listen to Plutarch as to a genuine story-teller of marvellous, yet true stories, and give his works a place with Robinson Crusoe, Sinbad the Sailor, and The Tales of a Grandfather, in their little libraries. Youth drink in from him a purer and loftier inspiration; and as he introduces them to the intimate acquaintance of one after another of the great, and wise, and good of antiquity, they resolve that they also will be something, and do something, in their day and generation. In times that try men's souls, he is usually an especial favourite. Amid revolutions, like the American and the French, the Washingtons and Franklins, the Lafayettes and Vergniauds, the Rolands and De Staëls, look to Plutarch for wisdom and strengthfor patterns how to live, and examples how to die. The Parallel Lives are a sort of heathen Book of Martyrs, which, though far from being a perfect, or, in any sense, a Christian standard, has yet animated thousands with the spirit of heroes and martyrs in the cause of liberty and virtue, of their country and mankind. It must be conceded, that, as a biographer, Plutarch does not show the nicest discrimination. His characters are too much of a piece; they want the infinite variety of nature, and of the highest works of art. He fails to discover those delicate, and almost evanescent lights and shades, which so dignify and adorn the creations of Homer and Shakspeare, the delineations of Thucydides and Tacitus, the conceptions of the great masters in history, as well as in Epic and Dramatic Poetry. He finds in each character some ruling passion, and then is inclined to use that as the key to unlock all the secrets of the life. Each personage is, therefore, too much like an incarnation of some virtue or vice, and by consequence too much like other incarnations of the same virtue or vice. They do not want life or reality: but they are deficient in individuality, in distinctive features, and delicate shades of colouring. His delineations are also somewhat wanting in ease and freedom. His plan, though ingenious and pleasing, is artificial: it sets him on the discovery of resemblances, which are sometimes only accidental and fancied. He seems also to have an innate fondness for the detection of remote analogies, or rather of minute correspondences. Who but Plutarch would ever have hit upon all these points of similarity between Demosthenes and Cicero? "The same ambition, the same love of liberty, appears in their whole administration, and the same timidity amidst wars and dangers. Nor did they less resemble each other in their fortunes: for I think it is impossible to find two other orators, who raised themselves from obscure beginnings to such authority and power, who both opposed kings and tyrants; who both lost their daughters; were banished their country, and returned with honour; were forced to fly again; were taken by their enemies, and at last expired the same hour with the liberties of their country." He hunts up correspondences; he runs after anecdotes illustrative of the ruling passion. Not that he confines himself to these: he loves facts also for their own sake. He will find a place for a good story, if it does not tally exactly with the parallel, or with the preconceived character of his hero. Still, he has a hero to bring forth-a character to make out; and he tells you so. He does not, like Homer, let you see it merely in the action or dialogue. He has little of the pure dramatic element. Yet he is not, on the other hand, purely didactic. He not only tells you that he has a hero whom he is going to bring forth; but, suiting the action to the word, he shows him to you. He describes him in words somewhat formal and precise; and if he stopped there, he were no better than a sophist. But he does not stop there: he sets him before you a living reality-speaking, acting, full of energy and power; and he is not a mere sophist, or philosopher, or historian; but a seer, a sage, a biographer, a painter of the lives of men for all time. Plutarch's Moralia are much less known than the Parallel Lives. They have been translated into Latin, French, and German, but never into English. Yet we think several of them well worthy of translation; and we wish some one, who could do him justice, would enrich our language with his tract "On the Education of Children,” with his "Consolation, addressed to his wife on the death of a daughter," with his "Precepts on Marriage," with his "Comparison between Superstition and Infidelity," and, especially, with his masterly argument "On the Delay of the Deity in Punishing the Wicked." It would be difficult to name the Modern Sermon, or Ethical Discourse, which is, on the whole, a more thorough and satisfactory discussion of that subject; though it were easy to find many a sermon that has been taken from it, bodily and spiritually, in doctrine, argument, and illustration, all but the text. Nor do we know of any modern work on marriage, in which, within the same compass, more excellent maxims are laid down, or more beautifully illustrated, than in the Precepta Conjugalia of Plutarch. It has all the affluence of comparison and allusion which so adorns the Marriage Ring of Jeremy Taylor; together with a conciseness and a definiteness, to which the English bishop was a stranger. The difficulties and the infelicities of Plutarch's style have both been exaggerated. When the student first opens his pages, he is repelled, and almost appalled, by the strangeness of the words and the singularity of their collocation. So many abstract nouns; so many adjectives superadded to bring out the abstract qualities more fully; such an accumulation of epithets and of similes; so many big words, and strong; so many words that he either never saw before, or has seen few and far between, with familiar words enough -- intervening to serve as a clew to their significance, but here piled heaps upon heaps, or strung along in thick and formidable succession; all these meeting him at once, are quite frightful to the beginner in the reading of Plutarch. Yet, as he learns the vocabulary, and grows familiar with the structure of the sentences, he discovers that these words, numerous as they are, all have a meaning; that these sentences, loose as they appear, are full of connected thought; that these epithets and similes, however accumulated, seldom fail to illustrate the sentiment, as well as to embellish the style; and that the discourse, rhetorical and declamatory as it seems in some respects to be, is yet methodical, argumentative, and replete with invaluable matter. He takes up a second treatise, and discovers the same characteristics. He not only meets with the same words in a similar arrangement, but he finds the author repeating his facts and illustrations, as Homer repeats, again and again, his favourite similes and descriptions; and as Demosthenes uses, over and over, his most successful appeals and his most eloquent passages. He now begins to feel at home, and at ease. He forgets the peculiarities of manner, which at first fastened his attention, and becomes absorbed in the matter: he no longer translates the Greek into English, still less arranges the words in the English order. He takes the impression of each word as he goes along; or, rather, he is borne on by the stream of thought and argument, which flows so deep and strong beneath the words, and he becomes a convert to the doctrine which is inculcated, or he resolves to imitate the hero or the sage whose life is portrayed. The Greek of Plutarch is very unlike the easy elegance of Plato, or the compact, artistic, symmetrical strength of Demosthenes. But, perhaps, it is not more different (though it is separated by a much longer interval of time) than the Latin of Pliny and Tacitus from that of Cæsar and Cicero, or the English of Macaulay and his fellow-reviewers, from that of Addison and the early English essayists. He has the faults of his profession as a public lecturer; and of his age-an age of scribblers and declaimers, of scholastics and rhetoricians. But, while he is far from the simplicity of the pure Attic historians and philosophers, he is still more removed from the common herd of contemporary writers. He is not a plausible sophist, a fulsome panegyrist, a bitter satirist, a heartless critic, a grammarian, a mere dealer in nouns, and verbs, and tropes, and metaphors. He is surpassingly rich in facts and thoughts, in great truths and noble sentiments. He is surprisingly free from the worst literary vices of his age. And as to its political, moral, and religious corruptions, he stood, not alone, but with a noble few, quite apart from them-far above them. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. II.-2 To gain a just appreciation of any man's character, we must contemplate him in his relation to the times and circumstances in which he lived. If while his vices were the vices of his age, his virtues were pre-eminently, though not exclusively, his own; if he was of his countrymen and contemporaries indeed, and yet far above and beyond them, it is high praise. Plutarch was born, as we have seen, at or near the middle of the first century. He died toward the close of the first quarter of the second century. The golden age of Roman literature had passed away, never to return. The Latin language and literature, like the Roman State, had put forth its blossoms, and they had fallen; it was still destined to bear fruit-rich and precious fruit-even to old age; nay, it might shoot up here and there a flower, but the season of bloom had gone by. The triumvirate of Latin historians-Cæsar, at once the author and the subject of his own history, and as inimitable in the simplicity of his narrative, as in the splendour of his achievements;-Sallust, affecting all the gravity, stateliness, and virtue of the old Roman, but greater and better in speech than in action; and Livy, born to celebrate the rising glories of his country in language worthy of the imperial and eternal city, and therefore born when that country had not, as yet, begun to decline from the zenith of her power-this triumvirate had spoken-had spoken in "the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the State ❞—and the muse of history was for a time silent. Roman eloquence had expired with Roman liberty; they found a burial together in the grave of Cicero: and for them, emphatically, there was no resurrection. Philosophy, too, had its freest play in his large and liberal mind-in his writings its most genial and attractive development. More profound thinkers, more earnest and courageous souls, came after him; but none in whom, as in Plato, the spirit of philosophy was manifested under a form altogether becoming. Latin poetry also had poured forth all its sweetest strains, and, swan-like, sung its own death-song. The Greek-like inspirations of Lucretius, (worthy of a better theme,) the unaffected ease and simplicity of Catullus, the melancholy tenderness of Tibullus, the artistic grace and elegance of Virgil, the intuitive good sense and exquisite taste of Horace, the marvellous ingenuity and overflowing exuberance of Ovid-the last echo of all these had died away on the delighted ear, and no Roman was ever to hear the like again. The politic and princely Augustus died half a century before Plutarch had finished his education. Of all those, to whose genius, learning, and taste, he owed the chief lustre of his immortal name, (though they in turn were indebted to him for scope and oppor |