Lecky in his History of European Morals, already cited, has some interesting passages on the relation of Seneca and Plutarch to certain phases of the thought of their time, a few of which may properly find a place here. He says: “A class of writers began to arise, who, like the Stoics, believed virtue rather than enjoyment, to be the supreme good, and who acknowledged that virtue consisted solely of the control which the enlightened will exercises over the desires, but who at the same time gave free scope to the benevolent affections, and a more religious and mystical tone to the whole scheme of morals.” “Plutarch, whose fame as a biographer has, I think, unduly eclipsed his reputation as a moralist, may be justly regarded as the leader of this movement, and his moral writings may be profitably compared with those of Seneca, the most ample exponent of the sterner school. Seneca is not unfrequently self-conscious, theatrical, and over-strained. His precepts have something of the affected ring of a popular preacher. The imperfect fusion of his short sentences gives his style a disjointed and, so to speak, granulated character, which the emperor Caligula happily expressed when he compared it to sand without cement; yet he often rises to a majesty of eloquence, a grandeur both of thought and expression, that few moralists have ever rivaled. Plutarch, though far less sublime, is more sustained, equable and uniformly pleasing. The Montaigne of antiquity, his genius coruscates playfully and gracefully around his subject; he delights in illustrations which are often singularly vivid and original, but which by their excessive multiplication appear sometimes rather the texture than the ornament of his discourse. A gentle, tender spirit, and a judgment equally free from paradox, exaggeration, and excessive subtilty, are characteristics of all he wrote. Plutarch excels most in collecting motives of consolation; Seneca in forming characters that need no consolation. There is something of the woman in Plutarch; Seneca is all man.[4] The writings of the first resemble the strains of the flute, to which the ancients attributed the power of calming the possessions and chasing away the clouds of sorrow, and drawing men by gentle suasion into the paths of virtue; the writings of the other are like the trumpet blast which kindles the soul with heroic courage. The first is more fitted to console a mother sorrowing over her dead child; the second to nerve a brave man, without flinching and without illusion, to grapple with an inevitable fate. The elaborate letters which Seneca has left us on distinctive tenets of the Stoical school, such as the equality of the vices, or the evil of the affections, have now little more than an historic interest; but the general tone of his writings gives them a permanent importance, for they reflect and foster a certain type of excellence which, since the extinction of Stoicism, has had no adequate expression in literature.