From Italy, Plutarch returned to his native city, and there passed the last twenty or thirty years of his life, happy in the society of his wife, a paragon of good sense, economy, and virtue. Literature was henceforth his pursuit; but believing it a duty to devote part of his time to the public good, he accepted office from his fellow-townsmen, and was finally made chief-magistrate of Chæronea. He tells us with relish how his neighbors often laughed at his doing what they considered beneath his dignity. When they wondered that so great a man should carry fish from market in his own hands, he told them, “Why, it’s for myself;” and when they found fault with him for personally superintending the building of public edifices, he silenced them with the reply, “This service is not for myself, but for my country.” “The meaner the office you sustain,” said Plutarch, “the greater the compliment you pay to the public.” In his delightful retreat at Chæronea, Plutarch compiled from two hundred and fifty authorities the work that has given him a niche in the Temple of Fame—“Parallel Lives”—sparkling with interest and animation, as it is underlaid by good judgment. His plan was to present the biography of a distinguished Greek, follow it with that of some Roman, and then critically compare the two characters. But the “Lives,” as we have it, is not the complete work its author probably left at his death, inasmuch as a number of biographies and parallels are wanting. Though Plutarch’s passion for story-telling sometimes carries him beyond the bounds of the probable, yet his work is an invaluable storehouse; his capital literary portraits have stood the test of time, and are still universally admired. The charms of a book in which are recorded “the greatest characters and most admirable actions of the human race” can never fade. Among the best of Plutarch’s Parallels is his COMPARISON OF DEMOSTHENES AND CICERO. “Omitting an exact comparison of their respective faculties in speaking, yet thus much seems fit to be said: That Demosthenes, to make himself a master in rhetoric, applied all the faculties he had, natural or acquired, wholly that way; that he far surpassed in force and strength of eloquence all his contemporaries in political and judicial speaking, in grandeur and majesty all the panegyrical orators, and in accuracy and science all the logicians and rhetoricians of his day: That Cicero was highly educated, and by his diligent study became a most accomplished general scholar in all these branches, having left behind him numerous philosophical treatises of his own on Academic principles; as, indeed, even in his written speeches, both political and judicial, we see him continually trying to show his learning by the way.