Footnote 827: They sometimes selected more humble subjects for their panegyric, for example, the bumble-bee, or salt.—Isocrat. Hel. Encom. § 4. p. 461. Plutarch, too, speaks of a learned work on salt, which he considered very edifying.—Sympos. § 5. A French author of the same class devoted twenty years of his life to a treatise on the nightingale. Another member of this confraternity is celebrated by Rousseau:—“On dit qu’un allemand a fait un livre sur un zeste de citron; j’en aurais fait un sur chaque gramen des prés, sur chaque mousse des bois, sur chaque lichen qui tapisse les rochers; enfin, je ne voulais pas laisser un poil d’herbe, pas un atome végétal qui ne fût amplement décrit.”—Réveries, t. iii. p. 106. On the verbal trifling of the sophists see Muret. in Aristot. Ethic. p. 79. By Le Conte, in his Commentary on the Anabasis, Gorgias is transformed into “a prudent and experienced officer,” because Proxenos is said to have studied under him.—t. i. p. 246. Footnote 828: Plut. Conj. Præcept. § 43. whom Geel follows.—Hist. Sophist. p. 25. But Isocrates, who had been himself a hearer of Gorgias in Thessaly (Cic. Orat. § 22), relates that he was never married, and had no children.—De Permut. § 26. 10. Another tradition however speaks of his son Philip as having been condemned by the Heliasts.—Schol. Aristoph. Av. 1700. Over the latter days of Gorgias[829] hovers the same darkness which conceals from view the commencement. It is known with no degree of certainty where he spent the close of his long life or where he died, though as no account exists of his return to Sicily, it probably was in Greece. Footnote 829: See Athen. xii. 71.