There is no English translation of Plutarch’s “Ethics” which can claim anything approaching the character of an authorized version. Almost every editor of Plutarch has felt it necessary to find fault with his predecessors’ attempts to express Plutarch’s meaning through the medium of another language. Amyot’s translation is, in the opinion of the Comte Joseph de Maistre, repellent to “ladies and foreigners.” Wyttenbach, who makes numerous alterations of Xylander’s Latin version, also says of Ricard’s French translation, that “it skips over the difficulties and corruptions in such a manner as to suggest that the translator was content merely to produce a version which should be intelligible to French readers.”[19] Wyttenbach himself is reprehended in the following terms by the editor of the Didot text of the “Moralia”—“Of the Latin version, in which we have made numerous corrections, it must be admitted that Xylander and Wyttenbach, in dealing with corrupt passages, not infrequently translated conjectures of their own, or suggested by other scholars, which we have been unable to adopt into the Greek Text.” In the preface to his English translation of the “De Iside et Osiride,” the Rev. Samuel Squire, Archdeacon of Bath in 1744, has some excellent critical remarks on the style of previous translators of Plutarch, and he somewhat pathetically describes the difficulties awaiting the author who endeavours to translate that writer—“_To enter into another man’s Soul as it were, who lived several hundred years since, to go along with his thoughts, to trace, pursue, and connect his several ideas, to express them with propriety in a language different from that they were conceived in, and lastly to give the copy the air and spirit of an original, is not so easy a task as it may be perhaps deemed by those who have never made the attempt. The very few good translations of the learned authors into our own language, will sufficiently justify the truth of the observation—but if any one still doubts it, let him take the first section of the book before him, and make the experiment himself._” M. Gréard is briefer but equally emphatic—“_Toute traduction est une œuvre délicate, celle de Plutarque plus que toute autre peut-être_.”