Another of the Moralia, which has a special interest as regards the author’s own family, is on the “Training of Children,”—a series of counsels—including the careful heed of the parents to their own moral condition and habits—to which the experience of these intervening centuries has little to add, while it could find nothing to take away. In one sense, the miscellanies brought together under the name of “Moralia” bear that title not inappropriately; for, as I have intimated, Plutarch could not but be didactic in whatever he wrote, and the ethical feeling, spirit, and purpose are perpetually, yet never ostentatiously or inappropriately, coming to the surface on all kinds of subjects. But there is a great deal in the collection not professedly or directly ethical. There are many scraps of history and biography, and a very large number and variety of characteristic anecdotes, both of well-known personages, and of others who are made known to us almost as vividly by a single trait, deed, or saying as if we had their entire life-record. There is an invaluable series of “Apophthegms”[xxv:1] of kings and great commanders,[xxv:2] and another of “Laconic [or Spartan] Apophthegms,” which are much more than their name implies, some of them being condensed memoirs. There are, also, several papers that give us more definite notions than can be found anywhere else of the science and natural history of the author’s time. Withal, we have here so many references to manners, customs, and habits, such pictures of home with all that could give it the sweetness and grace that belong to it, such views of society, both in city and in country, in ordinary intercourse and on festive occasions, that one can learn more of life in that age in the Roman Empire from these volumes than from any other single author; and the writer of a book like Becker’s “Gallus” might find here almost all the materials that he would need, except for the delineation of the night-side of Roman extravagance, gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, and depravity, which came not within Plutarch’s experience.