and resumed the command. This he did not long exercise; the plague, which had not terminated its ravages, seized him as its victim, and carried him off in the third year of the war, about 492 years before J. C. As he was expiring, and seemingly senseless, the principal persons of Athens, who had assembled round his bed, softened their affliction by expatiating on his victories, and the number of his trophies." These exploits" said he to them, rising with some difficulty, "were the work of fortune, and common to me with other generals :-the only encomiums I merit as a minister, a general, and as a man, is, that not a citizen in Athens has been obliged to put on mourning on my account."

PLUTARCH.

WHETHER Considered as a moralist, an historian, or a philosopher, Plutarch is one of the most celebrated men of antiquity. The year of his birth is not known; but, upon the authority of some passages in his writings, it may be conjectured that he was born in Boeotia, five or six years before the death of the Emperor Claudius, that is to say, in the year of J. C. 49 or 50.

A very liberal education developed his natural endowments; but Plutarch owes more perhaps to meditation than to labour. He made, at an early period, several voyages into Italy, whither he was called by the state of affairs of his native city Chæronea. It is impossible to say at what period he undertook these voyages; certain it is, that he entered Rome for the first time towards the end of the reign of Vespasian, and that he never went there after that of Domitian, an epoch when he established himself entirely in Greece.

During his residence at Rome, his house was continually filled with the most eminent characters that the capital of the universe could boast. Men, celebrated for their rank or attainments, or distinguished by their learning or their talents, gathered round the philosopher of Charonea, to listen to his dissertations, and to profit by his lessons.

Some writers, Peter of Alexandria, and Eusebius, have

been desirous to ascertain the precise period when Plutarch was so much honoured at Rome. The former has fixed it in the third year of the reign of Nero, under the consulship of Rufus and his colleague; the latter, in his chronicle, places it at a year later, and, in another place, carries it to the time of Adrian, in the year 120 of J. C. The truth is, that Plutarch did not begin to be known at Rome until the reign of Vespasian, and that his reputation was in its utmost splendour under that of Trajan, when the Romans had read his immortal work of The Lives of Illustrious Men...

Plutarch might have aspired to the highest dignity, had he been disposed to remain at Rome, but nothing could induce him to renounce his native country. At an age when ambition has the greatest influence over the mind, he quitted a spot where he might have risen rapidly to the highest offices, abandoned the society of illustrious men, who admired his talents and esteemed his person, to pass the remainder of his days quietly, though ingloriously, in the midst of his countrymen. The model of all the civil virtues, a good son, husband, and father, he had not the vanity to imagine that supérior talents gave him the privilege of despising the subordinate dignities of the small town he inhabited: on the contrary, he esteemed it an honour to fill, with the most scrupulous attention, an inferior situation that was entrusted to him; which induced his countrymen, some time after, to recompence his zeal by the appointment of Archon, that is to say, by raising him to the rank of first magistrate.

As the exact year of the birth of Plutarch is uncertain, we are equally ignorant of the precise period of his death. Vossius assures us that he lived to the reign of Antoninus