but broken into fragments; every part by itself pompous, but the whole confused and unharmonious. His Latin, as Monsieur St Evremont has well observed, has nothing in it of the purity and elegance of Augustus his times; and it is of him and of his imitators that Petronius said,—_pace vestrâ liceat dixisse, primi omnium eloquentiam perdidistis_. The _controversiæ sententiis vibrantibus pictæ_, and the _vanus sententiarum strepitus_, make it evident that Seneca was taxed under the person of the old Rhetorician. What quarrel he had to the uncle and the nephew, I mean Seneca and Lucan, is not known; but Petronius plainly points them out, one for a bad orator, the other for as bad a poet. His own Essay of the Civil War is an open defiance of the “Pharsalia;” and the first oration of Eumolpus as full an arraignment of Seneca’s false eloquence. After all that has been said, he is certainly to be allowed a great wit, but not a good philosopher; not fit to be compared with Cicero, of whose reputation he was emulous, any more than Lucan is with Virgil. To sum up all in few words:—consider a philosopher declaiming against riches, yet vastly rich himself; against avarice, yet putting out his money at great extortion here in Britain; against honours, yet aiming to be emperor; against pleasure, yet enjoying Agrippina, and in his old age married to a beautiful young woman; and after this, let him be made a parallel to Plutarch. And now with the usual vanity of Dutch prefacers, I could load our author with the praises and commemorations of writers; for both ancient and modern have made honourable mention of him: but to cumber pages with this kind of stuff, were to raise a distrust in common readers that Plutarch wants them. Rualdus indeed has collected ample testimonies of them: but I will only recite the names of some, and refer you to him for the particular quotations. He reckons Gellius, Eusebius, Himerius the Sophister, Eunapius, Cyrillus of Alexandria, Theodoret, Agathias, Photius and Xiphilin, patriarchs of Constantinople, Johannes Sarisberiensis, the famous Petrarch, Petrus Victorius, and Justus Lipsius. But Theodorus Gaza, a man learned in the Latin, tongue, and a great restorer of the Greek, who lived above two hundred years ago, deserves to have his suffrage set down in words at length; for the rest have only commended Plutarch more than any single author, but he has extolled him above all together. It is said, that, having this extravagant question put to him by a friend,—that if learning must suffer a general shipwreck, and he had only his choice left him of preserving one author, who should be the man he would preserve? he answered, Plutarch; and probably might give this reason, that, in saving him, he should secure the best collection of them all.