As a stylist Plutarch is apt to be underrated. He is, it is true, no laborious atticist, and makes no point of writing like a purist in the classic manner of a Plato or a Lysias. But this does not mean that he is in the least negligent in either word or sentence. On the contrary, his words are selected with extreme care, and his sentences—where the text is sound, as for the most part it is—are rounded off and interlinked as watchfully as any natural writing need require. It is true that his vocabulary is large and his expression full, but, when his words are properly weighed and their metaphorical and other differentiations duly perceived, no understanding reader will call him verbose.[11] He displays an immense command of language, but no word plays an idle part, and if (like Cicero, whom in many respects he resembles) he is fond of joining what are erroneously called synonyms, it needs but little appreciation of verbal values to realize that the added words invariably carry some amplification, some more precise definition, or some emphasis helpful to a full grasp upon the sense. It is true also that his sentences are apt to appear—like the sentences of Ruskin’s earlier days—somewhat lengthy; nevertheless they commonly atone by lucidity of construction for any demand they may make upon sustained attention.[12] In a modern English dress they must necessarily be broken up, but a practised reader of Plutarch finds no more difficulty with them in the original than he would find with a passage of Demosthenes or Plato. To one who becomes familiar with them they are at least as agreeable as the staccato brevities of Seneca. What chiefly exacts some effort from the reader of Plutarchan Greek is the fact that its words are extraordinarily charged with metaphor and allusion.[13] His choice of one word rather than another is always nicely calculated. This truth once recognized, a reader cannot fail to admire both the consistency with which the writer maintains his similitude while he is upon it, and also the copious resources of vocabulary upon which he draws for the purpose. Meanwhile, despite any length of sentence and fullness of praise, Plutarch neither irritates with tricks and mannerisms nor wearies with pedantry and ponderousness. A pedant he could not be. He is no writer of Johnsonese. To him the best words are those which best suit their context, and he has no objection whatever to a dash of the colloquial or a touch of the homely or naïve. It is one of his characteristic merits that he knows when to take the higher and when the lower road of diction. He also knows when he is in danger of stylistic monotony. Plutarch was a teacher, but, like all truly intelligent members of that profession, he recognized that the most uninspiring attitude to adopt is the severely and unremittingly pedagogic. ‘The knack of style,’ it has been said, ‘is to write like a human being,’ and Plutarch, a professor of humanity without a chair, is always and