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which metre hath neither weakened the force, nor clouded the perspicuity of argument: nor will it be easy to find another example, equally happy, of this middle kind of writing, which, though prosaick in some parts, rises to high poetry in others, and neither towers to the skies, nor creeps along the ground." Life of DRYDEN.

DEDICATION

OF

PLUTARCH'S LIVES,

TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK."

TO HIS GRACE

THE DUKE OF ORMOND, &c.7

MY: LORD,

LUCRETIUS, endeavouring to prove from the principles of his philosophy, that the world had a casual beginning from the concourse of atoms, and that men, as well as the rest of animals,

The first volume of the Translation of Plutarch's Lives by several hands, to which the following Dedica tion was prefixed, was published in 1683; the remaining volumes in the three following years. The most considerable persons associated in this undertaking were, Richard Duke and Knightly Chetwood, Fellows of Trinity College, in Cambridge; Paul Rycaut, Esq. Thomas Creech, of Wadham College, Oxford, the translator of Horace, &c.; Edward Brown, M. D. author of Travels in Germany, &c.; Dr. Adam Littleton, author of the Latin Dictionary; John Caryl, Esq. I believe the friend of Pope; Mr. Joseph Arrowsmith; Thomas Rymer, Esq.; Dr. William Oldys; John Evelyn, Esq.; and Mr. Somers, afterwards Lord Somers, who translated the Life

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were produced from the vital heat and moisture of their mother earth, from the same principles is bound to answer this objection,-why men are not daily formed after the same manner; which he tells us, is, because the kindly warmth and procreative faculty of the ground is now worn out: the sun is a disabled lover and the earth is past her teeming time.

of Alcibiades, though his name is not prefixed to it. Beside the persons here enumerated, twenty-nine others were engaged in this work: so that the total number of the translators was forty-one. Dryden translated hone of the Lives.

7 James Butler, the twelfth Earl, and first Duke of Ormond, who during a long life was eminently distinguished for virtue, courage, and loyalty, was born in London, on the 19th of October, 1610. In December 1629, he married Lady Elizabeth Preston, daughter of Richard, Lord Dingwell, and Earl of Desmond in Ireland. For his great services and sufferings in the cause of Charles the First and Second, July 20th, 1660, he was created an English Peer, by the titles of Lord Butler of Lanthony and Earl of Brecknock, and was made Lord Steward of the Household, an office which he held during the whole of the reign of Charles the Second. In 1661 he was created Duke of Ormond in Ireland, and the 9th of November, 1682, obtained the same title in England. He was also honoured with the Garter, and was thrice Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; in 1662, 1677, and 1684.

This highly respectable nobleman, who honoured our author with his patronage, and often admitted him to his table, died at his seat in Dorsetshire, July 21, 1688; and on the 4th of August he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

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Though religion has informed us better of our origin, yet it appears plainly, that not only the bodies, but the souls of men, have decreased from the vigour of the first ages; that we are not more short of the stature and strength of those gigantick heroes, than we are of their understanding and their wit. To let pass those happy patriarchs who were striplings at fourscore, and had afterwards seven or eight hundred years before them to beget sons and daughters, and to consider man in reference only to his mind, and that no higher than the age of Socrates, how vast a difference is there be twixt the productions of those souls, and these of ours? How much better Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the philosophers understood nature; Thucydides and Herodotus adorned history; Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander advanced poetry, than those dwarfs of wit and learning who succeeded them in after times? That age was most famous amongst the Greeks which ended with the death of Alexander; amongst the Romans learning seemed again to revive and flourish in the century which produced Cicero, Varro, Sallust, Livy, Lucretius, and Virgil:' and after a short interval of years, wherein

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8 Herodotus died about 413 years A. and Menander 293 years C.; Plato, Aristotle, &c. in the intermediate period, a period of about 120 years.

This estimate would exclude Menander, for Alex. ander died 323 years before Christ, and one year before his master, Aristotle.

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nature seemed to take a breathing time for a second birth, there sprung up under the Vespasians, and those excellent princes who succeeded them, a race of memorable wits, such as were the two Plinies, Tacitus, and Suetonius; and as if Greece was emulous of the Roman learning, under the

mentioned, except Menander. The dates of the respective births of the Roman authors here enumerated, are as follows:

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Livy died A. D. 17, in the year of Rome 771; between which and the birth of Varro, is a period of 134 years, in which flourished, beside those enumerated by our author, Cæsar, Catullus, Cornelius Nepos, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, and Propertius.

2

Pliny, the Naturalist, died A. D. 79, in the first year of Titus; his nephew, the younger Pliny, died in 113, the 15th year of Trajan. Tacitus was born in the last year of Claudius, A. D. 54, and is supposed to have died in the last year of Trajan, A. D. 117, at the age of 63. He did not begin his HISTORY, (which, though it comprizes a later period, was written before his ANNALS,) till 98, which was the first year of that Emperor's reign.Suetonius was born in the fifth year of Vespasian, A. D. 75, and is supposed to have written his Lives of the Emperors, when he was forty-seven years old, in the fifth year of Adrian, A. D. 122, five years after the death of Tacitus.

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