[1]. ‘Tout abregé sur un bon livre est un sot abregé.’—Montaigne, iii. 8.
[2]. Xylander reads οὐδέν, but οὐ before πολλά seems simpler, and makes better logic.
[4]. On this point, and on Plutarch’s life generally, see the buoyant and chivalrous pages of the late Mr. George Wyndham’s introduction to North’s Lives in the Tudor Translations.
[5]. See pp. [54], [253]. I have searched such numbers of the Dissertations as appear to have reached this country from Vienna since 1910, without coming upon the continuation of Dr. Adler’s argument. It will be of great interest when it comes to hand, but could not adequately be discussed here.
[6]. ‘Où je puyse comme les Danaïdes, remplissant et versant sans cesse.’—i. 25.
[7]. The Symposiacs were specially favourite reading of Archbishop Trench, whose bright little volume of Lectures is perhaps the best introduction for English readers to the Moralia.
[8]. The same argument might perhaps be applied to the Lives, even as far as that of Dion, but there is no elaborate dedication there.
[9]. Dr. Mahaffy has acutely pointed out that the tract De Tranquillitate animi must have been written before the accession of Titus in A. D. 79, because it contains a remark (467 E) that no Roman Emperor had yet been succeeded by his son. It is this sort of evidence of a date which we seek, but do not find, in the Symposiacs.
[10]. Some of Plutarch’s characters exemplify the ‘sternness of the judgements of youth’, as the younger Diogenianus.—See p. [94].