Englishmen, and especially students of English literature, ought to take no mean interest in the tractate on Education, [Sidenote: _The “Education.”_] if only for the reason that it had a most powerful influence on the great Elizabethan age, both directly and through the medium of Lyly’s _Euphues_, which is in part[195] almost a translation of it. But though, not merely for this but other more intrinsic reasons, the treatise _is_ interesting, it is not of much good to us. In fact, it is scarcely a paradox to say that it is one of its merits not to be of much good to us. It is a truism that the very noblest characteristic of Greek education, a characteristic never fully recovered since, was its combination of high literary ideas with the most perfect and practical recognition of the fact that book-education by itself is education of the most wretchedly inadequate character. Plutarch (and again it is much to his credit) thoroughly shared this view—so thoroughly that he begins his treatise a little before the birth of the children to be educated, and continues it (quite in the Rousseau style) by insisting that mothers shall suckle their own offspring. From the first the importance of inculcating good habits, of not telling children immoral or silly stories, of being careful in the selection of nurses and tutors,—this is the thing that Plutarch busies himself about. He will have them learn all the usual arts and sciences, but he dwells on these very little. How to give them good morals and healthy bodies; how to keep them or wean them from bad company and foul language; how to practise them in manly sports and exercises—these are Plutarch’s cares. Excellent, nay! thrice excellent preoccupation! but it necessarily makes the treatise of no use to _us_. Footnote 195: The section “Euphues and his Ephœbus.” The three tractates commented on in this and the next paragraph will be found in vol. i. pp. 1-111 of the edition cited.