Plutarch’s writings are sufficiently numerous. The _Parallel Lives_, forty-six in number, in which he brings together a Greek and a Roman celebrity by way of comparison, is perhaps the book of Greek and Latin literature which has been the most widely read in all languages. “The reason of its popularity,” justly observes a writer in Dr. Smith’s _Dictionary_, “is that Plutarch has rightly conceived the business of a biographer--his biography is true portraiture. Other biography is often a dull, tedious enumeration of facts in the order of time, with perhaps a summing up of character at the end. The reflections of Plutarch are neither impertinent nor trifling; his sound good sense is always there; his honest purpose is transparent; his love of humanity warms the whole. His work is and will remain, in spite of all the fault that can be found with it by plodding collectors of facts and small critics, the book of those who can nobly think and dare and do.” His miscellaneous writings--indiscriminately classed under the title _Moralia_, or _Morals_, but including historical, antiquarian, literary, political, and religious disquisitions--are about eighty in number. As might be expected of so miscellaneous a collection, these essays are of various merit, and some of them are, doubtless, the product of other minds than Plutarch’s. Next to the _Essay on Flesh Eating_[38] may be distinguished as amongst the most important or interesting, _That the Lower Animals Reason_,[39] _On the Sagacity of the Lower Animals_--highly meritorious treatises, far beyond the ethical or intellectual standard of the mass of “educated” people even of our day--_Rules for the Preservation of Health_, _A Discourse on the Training of Children_, _Marriage Precepts, or Advice to the Newly Married_, _On Justice_, _On the Soul_, _Symposiacs_--in which he deals with a variety of interesting or curious questions--_Isis and Osiris_, a theological disquisition; _On the Opinions of the Philosophers_, _On the Face that Appears in the Moon_,[40] _Political Precepts_, _Platonic Questions_, and last, not least, his _Consolation_, addressed to Timoxena. Plutarch also wrote his autobiography. If it had come down to us it would have been one of the most interesting remains of Antiquity, dealing, as we may well imagine it did deal, with some of the most important phenomena of the age. Possibly we might have had the expression of his feeling and attitude in regard to the new religion (established some 200 years later), which, strangely enough, is altogether overlooked or ignored as well by himself as by the other eminent writers of Greece and Italy.[41]