Over and above his resemblances to Macaulay as a writer of essays and biographical history, there is a distinct similarity between their conversational tastes. We can imagine a Plutarch fully at home with Macaulay at one of those astonishing early Victorian breakfast-parties where a man might be asked if he ‘knew his Popes’, and where he might be endured while he recited them. Plutarch’s _Table-Talk_, like his _Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_, reveals for contemporary Greek society the same deliberate cult of intellectual conversation sharpened by challenge and debate. In such conversation he must himself have played a conspicuous part. Nevertheless, it may fairly be gathered that the Greek or Graeco-Roman interlocutors in the reign of Trajan were the more ingenuously athirst for reciprocal enlightenment, however dubiously we may regard the value of the information or misinformation actually gained. Nor is it easy to believe that Plutarch would have thought it etiquette to indulge in the protracted monologues to which the more modern society submitted with such grace as it best could. Footnote 4: e.g. in his _De repugnantiis Stoicorum_ and his _Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum_. Yet, as Mahaffy says, ‘it would be hard to say whether the number of Stoic dogmas which he rejects exceeds that which he quotes with approval’ (_The Greek World under Roman Sway_, pp. 300 sqq.). Footnote 5: Volkmann names in particular Clement of Alexandria and Basil. Footnote 6: This does not mean that he had no friends among the rhetorical teachers (the contrary is shown by his reference to ‘our Niger’ in _praec. san._, § 16), but only that he distrusted the type. He refused to approve of a fluent and polished style as an end in itself. Pliny describes how the amazingly voluble Isaeus would offer his audience a choice of subject and allow it to dictate the side which he should take. He would then rise and demonstrate his extemporizing powers with much show of rhetorical ornament. Footnote 7: Volkmann says of the _Lives_, ‘Das Werthvolle an ihnen sind nicht die historischen Details, die er giebt, sondern die eingestreuten Reflexionen, die ethischen Betrachtungen, das Eingehen auf individuelle Stimmungen und Leidenschaften der grossen Männer.’ Footnote 8: _Aulicis tantum scripsit, non doctis_, says Scaliger. Footnote 9: Volkmann guesses that it is _ein Produkt der späteren Sophistik_. If so, we may congratulate the Sophist on his perfect reproduction of Plutarch’s style and of his non-sophistic tone. Footnote 10: Bacon’s Essay _Of Followers and Friends_ owes almost nothing to Plutarch beyond the title. We do, however, find him borrowing the words ‘for there is no such Flatterer as a Man’s selfe’. Footnote 11: As Volkmann happily puts it, he writes ‘with comfortable breadth’. Footnote 12: