The sentences would doubtless have been easier still if Plutarch had not felt bound to follow the fashion of the time and elaborately avoid hiatus. Footnote 13: Perhaps this is why Plutarch, as seen through Amyot, appeared to Montaigne ‘close and thorny,’ while his sense was nevertheless ‘closely-jointed and pithily-continued’. Footnote 14: Stobaeus (sixth century) had access to much of Plutarch that is now lost. Footnote 15: See an observation of Professor Summers, _Seneca Select Letters_, Introduction, p. lxxiv. Footnote 16: Plutarch ‘is the theme of more than 230 allusions or direct references on the part of Jeremy Taylor’ (Sandys, _A History of Classical Scholarship_, i. 300). Footnote 17: He was familiar reading of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and appears in the _Gesta Romanorum_. Later the _Adagia_ of Erasmus draw freely upon him. Footnote 18: ‘Il a en quelque sorte créé Plutarque,’ says Demogeot. Footnote 19: _Euphues_ appeared in 1579. Jusserand (_The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare_, p. 127) remarks that Euphues ‘addresses moral epistles to his fellow men to guide them through life’, but he appears to be unaware that Lyly borrowed this object, as well as so large a quantity of his matter, from Plutarch. Footnote 20: We meet, for example, with the story of Zeno, ‘the olde man in Athens that amiddest the pottes could hold his peace.’ Footnote 21: _History of Greek Classical Literature_, ii. 427. Footnote 22: _The Literature of Ancient Greece_, p. 396. Footnote 23: Quoted by Sandys (_A History of Classical Scholarship_, i. 300). CONTENTS Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages 27 On Old Men in Public Life 65 Advice to Married Couples 96 Concerning Busybodies 113 On Garrulousness 130 On the Student at Lectures 157 On Moral Ignorance in High Places 180 Fawner and Friend 187 On Bringing up a Boy 241 Notes on Persons and Places 267 Appendix: Notes on the Greek Text 295 _In the following imaginary ‘Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages’ the supposed narrator is a certain Diocles of Corinth, a professional diviner and expiator of omens connected with the court of Periander, who was despot of Corinth from 625_ B. C. _to 585_ B. C. _The dramatic date is towards the close of that period. It must not be assumed that Plutarch is pretending to be historical, and anachronisms must be disregarded._