The text which has been used for the purposes of this essay is that issued at intervals between the years 1888 and 1896 by Mr. G. N. Bernardakis, the director of the Gymnasium at Mytilene.[2] The editor has postponed, for discussion in a subsequent work, many questions bearing upon the authority of his MSS., and the principles which he has applied to them in the choice of his readings; his efforts in the _editio minor_ having been almost wholly confined to presenting the results of his labours in the shape of a complete and coherent text. Although, as Dr. Holden has said, “until the appearance of the promised _editio major_ it is premature to pronounce an opinion on the editor’s qualifications as a textual critic,”[3] yet Mr. Bernardakis has exhibited so much combined accuracy and acumen in the preliminary discussion of various questions connected with his collation of MSS., and has disposed so completely, as Dr. Holden admits, of the charges of inaccuracy brought against him by Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff of Berlin,[4] that the more general student of Classical Literature may, perhaps, feel some amount of confidence that in this edition he sees the actual work of Plutarch himself, and not the ingenious and daring conjectures of some too brilliant critic. This feeling of confidence will not be diminished by the evident anxiety displayed by Mr. W. R. Paton, an English scholar working in the same field, “to induce Mr. Bernardakis to assist and correct” him in editing a text of the “De Cupiditate Divitiarum,”[5] and it will be increased by the discovery that, greatly different as the text of Bernardakis is from that of any other previous edition, the difference frequently consists in the substitution of plain sense for undiluted absurdity, or total want of meaning.