entirely human. That his pen must have moved with extraordinary facility is evident from the number of his publications. Apart from his _Lives_ (of which not all are extant), his _Moralia_ include over eighty pieces, long or short, and it is certain that many others had disappeared[14] before the present collection became available in its eleventh-century MS. It is not here implied that he is never culpable, never over-loaded. There are times, though rare ones, at which we feel that his memory or his notebook has been unduly exploited. We feel that he might have spared us an illustration which does not illustrate or a similitude which is deficient in similarity. To a certain extent he is a Euphuist, and though Guevara perhaps owed nothing directly to him (as he did to Seneca[15]), it is manifest that Plutarch sometimes strains a point in order to achieve an over-ingenious comparison. The contagion of the thing, like that of Euphuism in the Elizabethan age, was in the air, and Plutarch assuredly does not err more often or more heinously with one generation than Shakespeare did with another. Wide reading and natural fecundity easily slip into sins which narrow resources and slow invention are impotent to commit. * * * * * There are numerous signs that the pendulum of classical interest is swinging in the direction of the literature of the early Empire. The exclusive _toujours perdrix_ of the Attic and Ciceronian periods has apparently begun to jade the palate, and writers like Seneca and Plutarch are coming into their own once more. There was a time when these authors were perhaps better known than any others. That they were worthy of prime consideration is manifest from the immense influence which they exercised upon the ardent and inquiring spirits of the sixteenth and following centuries, in England no less than on the Continent. Authors who could make such an appeal to Montaigne, to the Elizabethan dramatists, to Bacon, or to Jeremy Taylor,[16] are surely not to be despised because they belong stylistically to a ‘silver’ age, or because their strength lies mostly in the fact that they are a mine of ideas, wise saws, and pointed moral instances. Seneca, as being a writer of Latin, was naturally the earlier and more widely read,[17] but from the publication of the _editio princeps_ of Plutarch by Aldus in 1509 our author sprang into peculiar estimation among the recovered spirits of antiquity. It was, however, due to Amyot that both his _Lives_ and his _Essays_ became accessible to those who had little or no Greek. The _Essays_ were rendered into idiomatic French by that admirable translator in the year 1572,[18] and Montaigne was by no means the only reader among _nous autres ignorans_ who made the Plutarch of Amyot his breviary, and who ‘drew his water incessantly’ from him. It was not the literary etiquette of the Elizabethan age to acknowledge all