Pius: what may be affirmed with greater confidence is, that he died at an advanced age, about the 140th year of the christian æra.

It was asked of a person eminent for his talents and his taste, which, of all the writings of antiquity, he would preserve, had he only the power of retaining one: "The Lives of Plutarch," was his reply. Of all the works of the ancients, it, in fact, is the one most justly esteemed, the most frequently read, and which affords the highest entertainment on each perusal. The love of truth pervades the Lives of Plutarch; history is no where so essentially moral as in that author; nothing dazzles or inflames him; he weighs men in the proper balance, and assigns to each his proper value. If his narrative be at times deficient in perspicuity and method, it must be recollected that he always supposes an anterior acquaintance with general history. He is more occupied with men than with things; his subject is particularly man, whose life he writes; this he always fills to the best of his judgment, not by the accumulation of details, as Suetonius, but by the representation of peculiar traits. With respect to the Parallels, they are finished pieces; in these Plutarch seems superior to himself, both as a writer and philosopher. But if his judgment of men be correct, he is no less so in his appreciation of things; of this we may be convinced by reading his other productions. Every thing is just and substantial in the multitude of small treatises which compose his Moral Works. There is only one production in which Plutarch has betrayed some asperity, and in which he has in consequence somewhat deviated from that attention to truth which forms his principal character; that is in his accusation of Herodotus. This can only be excused by his attachment to his native country. Herodotus had not

done justice to the people of Peloponnesus, to whose welfare nothing was indifferent to Plutarch.

The best editions of his works are that of Henry Stephens, Greek and Latin, 1572, 4to.; that of Maussac, 1624, 2 vols. folio; and that of London, 1729, 5 vols. 4to.; and his lives have been translated into English by Dryden and Langhorne,

Or the numerous characters produced by the revolution in, France, no one has left behind him a name so universally abhorred as Robespierre. Tyrannical without character, and barbarous without necessity, his reign, which gave birth to so many painful recollections, was that of every sort of crime, and of every species of cruelty. He depopulated France of every thing which was its honour and its glory, and his dark and bloody tyranny appeared without motive, as it was without example. Robespierre had none of those advantages which place a man above the multitude, and which are so many titles to dominion. He had neither that strength of mind which produces extraordinary events, nor those talents which supply the place of genius. He neither knew how to create circumstances, nor to profit by those which chance presented to him; his irresolution attests his want of courage, and his want of courage hastened his fall, Stern, obdurate, without imagination, he possessed only the talent of profiting by the abilities of others. It is to be remarked, that it was not in those epochs when the legislative assemblies resounded with the eloquence of its orators, that Robespierre acquired his baneful influence; he obtained it when the revolutionary hurricane had swept away the men of talents, and transported to the political stage adventurers until then unknown, whose genius led them to the commission of crimes. Among these degenerate beings Robespierre particularly distinguished himself, more by his