Though religion has informed us better of our origin, yet it appears plainly, that not only the bodies, but the souls of men, have decreased from the vigour of the first ages; that we are not more short of the stature and strength of those gigantic heroes, than we are of their understanding and their wit. To let pass those happy patriarchs who were striplings at fourscore, and had afterwards seven or eight hundred years before them to beget sons and daughters, and to consider man in reference only to his mind, and that no higher than the age of Socrates, how vast a difference is there betwixt the productions of those souls, and these of ours? How much better Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the philosophers understood nature; Thucydides and Herodotus adorned history; Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander advanced poetry, than those dwarfs of wit and learning who succeeded them in after times? That age was most famous amongst the Greeks which ended with the death of Alexander; amongst the Romans, learning seemed again to revive and flourish in the century which produced Cicero, Varro, Sallust, Livy, Lucretius, and Virgil: and after a short interval of years, wherein nature seemed to take a breathing time for a second birth, there sprung up under the Vespasians, and those excellent princes who succeeded them, a race of memorable wits, such as were the two Plinies, Tacitus, and Suetonius; and, as if Greece was emulous of the Roman learning, under the same favourable constellation was born the famous philosopher and historian, Plutarch; than whom antiquity has never produced a man more generally knowing, or more virtuous; and no succeeding age has equalled him.