“Our master,” says he, “one time perceiving, at his afternoon lecture, that some of his scholars had eaten more largely than became the moderation of students, immediately commanded one of his freedmen to take his own son, and scourge him in our sight: because, said the philosopher, my young gentleman could not eat his dinner without poignant sauce, or vinegar; and at the same time he cast his eye on all of us; so that every criminal was given to understand, that he had a share in the reprehension, and that the punishment was as well deserved by all the rest, had the philosopher not known that it exceeded his commission to inflict it.” Plutarch, therefore, having the assistance of such a master, in few years advanced to admiration in knowledge; and that without first travelling into foreign parts, or acquiring any foreign tongue; though the Roman language at that time was not only vulgar in Rome itself, but generally through the extent of that vast empire, and in Greece, which was a member of it, as our author has remarked towards the end of his Platonic Questions. For, like a true philosopher, who minded things, not words, he strove not even to cultivate his mother tongue with any great exactness; and himself confesses, in the beginning of Demosthenes his life, that during his abode in Italy, and at Rome, he had neither the leisure to study, nor so much as to exercise the Roman language, (I suppose he means to write in it, rather than to speak it,) as well by reason of the affairs he managed, as that he might acquit himself to those who were desirous to be instructed by him in philosophy: insomuch, that till the declination of his age, he began not to be conversant in Latin books; in reading of which it happened somewhat oddly to him, that he learnt not the knowledge of things by words, but by the understanding and use he had of things, attained to the knowledge of words which signified them: just as Adam (setting aside Divine illumination) called the creatures by their proper names, by first understanding of their natures. But for the delicacies of the tongue, the turns of the expressions, the figures and connections of words, in which consist the beauty of that language, he plainly tells us, that though he much admired them, yet they required too great labour for a man in age, and plunged in business, to attain perfectly; which compliment I should be willing to believe from a philosopher, if I did not consider that Dion Cassius, nay even Herodian and Appian after him, as well as Polybius before him, by writing the Roman History in the Greek language, had shewn as manifest a contempt of Latin, in respect of the other, as Frenchmen now do of English, which they disdain to speak while they live among us; but, with great advantage to their trivial conceptions, drawing the discourse into their own language, have learned to despise our better thoughts, which must come deformed and lame in conversation to them, as being transmitted in