ient." But if they are borrowed, they
have none of the discordant effect of the _purpureus pannus_, for the
warm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes them
his own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly
original. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is this
selectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the natural
elevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or
sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. We
are speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays are
trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and
there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has
flowed down through auriferous soil. "We sail on his memory into the
ports of every nation," says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction
to Goodwin's Plutarch's "Morals." No doubt we are becalmed pretty often,
and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation,
so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and
quotation.

It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser,
in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whose
mind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative
(if we take the "Lives" and the "Morals" together) in the thought and
action of men than any other single author, ancient or modern. And on
the whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogether
good, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning them
over to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity. And so wide was his
own curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to their
purpose in his discursive pages. For he was equally at home among men
and ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other. His
influence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of any
other ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been the
Robinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a
remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years,
living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had
peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of
his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspect
that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of
us. Here was the human footprint whic