A few lines about the scholar to whose prolonged labours upon Plutarch we owe so much are only his due. Daniel Wyttenbach was born at Bern, where his father was a divine of good Swiss family, in 1746. He studied at Marburg and Göttingen, and passed to Holland, filling professorial chairs at Amsterdam, and, from 1798, at Leyden. In Holland he was the colleague and intimate friend of Valckenaer (1715-85) and David Ruhnken (1723-98), himself by birth a German. By their advice, he turned from a meditated edition of the Emperor Julian’s works to Plutarch. The two advisers were not quite at one, and Wyttenbach seemed to crouch between two burdens—Valckenaer wished him to produce a final edition of some one work, Ruhnken (who would gladly have faced the task himself if he had been a younger man) preferred that he should not stop short of all Plutarch. In 1772 he produced his learned and complete commentary on the _De sera numinum Vindicta_. About this time the Delegates of the Oxford Press were anxious to produce a worthy edition of a great classic; and in 1788 Thomas Burgess, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, afterwards Bishop of St. Davids and of Salisbury, visited Holland and sought an introduction to Wyttenbach, with whom an arrangement was concluded in the autumn of that year. The issue of the volumes of text, with critical notes and revised Latin version, began in 1795 and went on steadily till 1797; but there was much delay and many searchings of heart over the last volume, containing the fragments, the dispatch of which was hindered by the state of war and the occupation of Holland by foreign troops. It was at last discovered in 1800 in the port of Hamburg, and appears to have reached Oxford in that year. The first two volumes of the commentary, to page 242 C, had preceded it in 1798, and were also published in 1800. The last volume must have proceeded slowly, for it had only reached 392 D, near the end of the _E at Delphi_, when, on January 12, 1807, it was interrupted by an explosion due to the careless use of fire on a barge loaded with gunpowder. The effects of the conflagration which followed are visible in Leyden to this day. The disaster was ill-timed for us, for the commentary stops just short of a passage of great interest (see p. 75). Wyttenbach bore this trouble, which he has graphically described in several letters, and also those caused by ill health and narrowed means, with much fortitude. He died in 1820, and the last volume of the commentary was sent to Oxford and published in 1821, followed by the two volumes of the _Index Graecitatis_ in 1830. He was a most amiable man, and the letters which passed between him and Ruhnken have much charm of feeling and expression. Both wrote in admirable Latin; Wyttenbach’s style is always fluent and picturesque, but has certain idiosyncrasies, which may delay an English reader.[15]