about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually
gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom
invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook
like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled
amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming
intervals to the "primal duties," he turns back with a settled
predilection to the "sympathies that are nestled at the feet like
flowers." But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to him
and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother
of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is
most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that
passage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the
volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis. If we are in the
_atrium_ (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the
great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and
who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become
human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his
lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible
virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion,
patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which
associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is
theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson
disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian
unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended
him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints
which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch
in the essay on "Physiognomy." After speaking of some "escripts encores
plus reverez," he asks, in his idiomatic way, "a, quoy faire nous allons
nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?" More than this, however,
Montaigne liked him because he was _good talk_, as it is called, a
better companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which are
noble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation
between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his style
is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in
Plutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived
perhaps from authors much more anc