deep and sagacious; and what can be more
useful to a reader than a wise man's judgment on a great man's conduct?
In my writings you will find no rash censures, no undeserved encomiums,
no mean compliance with popular opinions, no vain ostentation of critical
skill, nor any affected finesse. In my "Parallels," which used to be
admired as pieces of excellent judgment, I compare with perfect
impartiality one great man with another, and each with the rule of
justice. If, indeed, latter ages have produced greater men and better
writers, my heroes and my works ought to give place to them. As the
world has now the advantage of much better rules of morality than the
unassisted reason of poor Pagans could form, I do not wonder that those
vices, which appeared to us as mere blemishes in great characters, should
seem most horrid deformities in the purer eyes of the present age--a
delicacy I do not blame, but admire and commend. And I must censure you
for endeavouring, if you could publish better examples, to obtrude on
your countrymen such as were defective. I rejoice at the preference
which they give to perfect and unalloyed virtue; and as I shall ever
retain a high veneration for the illustrious men of every age, I should
be glad if you would give me some account of those persons who in wisdom,
justice, valour, patriotism, have eclipsed my Solon, Numa, Camillus, and
other boasts of Greece or Rome.

_Bookseller_.--Why, Master Plutarch, you are talking Greek indeed. That
work which repaired the loss I sustained by the costly edition of your
books was "The Lives of the Highwaymen;" but I should never have grown
rich if it had not been by publishing "The Lives of Men that Never
Lived." You must know that, though in all times it was possible to have
a great deal of learning and very little wisdom, yet it is only by a
modern improvement in the art of writing that a man may read all his life
and have no learning or knowledge at all, which begins to be an advantage
of the greatest importance. There is as natural a war between your men
of science and fools as between the cranes and the pigmies of old. Most
of our young men having deserted to the fools, the party of the learned
is near being beaten out of the field; and I hope in a little while they
will not dare to peep out of their forts and fastnesses at Oxford and
Cambridge. There let them stay and study old musty moralists till one
falls in love with the Greek, another with