Lives was one of the few books recommended to Catharine II. of Russia, as she herself tells us, wherewith to solace and instruct herself during the first wretched years of her miserable married life. It is, perhaps, not impossible to trace in some passages of her later life the results of what she then read. [Footnote G: _Essays._ Book I., Chapter 25.] [Footnote H: _Essays_, II. 23.] [Footnote I: _Ibid._ II. 10.] [Footnote J: _Les Rêveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire._ Quatrième Promenade.] And thus we might go on accumulating the names of men and women whom all the world knows, who have confessed their obligations to the old biographer,--philosophers like Bacon, warriors like Bussy d'Amboise, poets like Wordsworth; while many a one has owed much to him who has made no open acknowledgment of his debt. Montaigne somewhere complains of the unlicensed stealings from his author; and Udall, in his Preface to the Apophthegms of Erasmus, declares,--"It is a thing scarcely believable, how much, and how boldly as well, the common writers that from time to time have copied out his [Plutarch's] works, as also certain that have thought themselves liable to control and amend all men's doings, have taken upon them in this author, who ought with all reverence to be handled of them, and with all fear to have been preserved from altering, depraving, or corrupting."[K] [Footnote K: The following passage presents a view of some of the uses to which Plutarch's narratives were turned during the Middle Ages. "Or personne n'ignore que les chroniqueurs du moyen âge compilaient les faits les plus remarquables de l'Écriture Sainte ou des histoires profanes pour les mêler à leurs récits. C'est ainsi que ceux qui ont écrit la vie de Du Guesclin ont mis sur le compte de ce héros ce que Plutarque rapporte de plus mémorable des grands hommes de l'antiquité."--SOUVESTRE. _Les Derniers Bretons._ I. 147.]