We have already seen large volumes of state collections, and church legends, stuffed with detected forgeries in some parts, and gaping with omissions of truth in others: not penned, I suppose, with so vain a hope as to cheat posterity, but to advance some design in the present age: for these legerdemain authors are for telling stories to keep their trick undiscovered, and to make their conveyance the more clean. What calumny your Grace may expect from such writers is already evident; but it will fare with them as it does with ill painters; a picture so unlike in all its features and proportions reflects not on the original, but on the artist; for malice will make a piece more unresembling than ignorance; and he who studies. the life, yet bungles, may draw some faint imitation of it, but he who purposely avoids nature, must fall into grotesque, and make no likeness. For my own part, I am of the former sort, and therefore presume not to offer my unskilfulness for so excellent a design as is your illustrious life. To pray for its prosperity and continuance is my duty, as it is my ambition to appear on all occasions, Your Grace's most obedient and devoted servant, JOHN DRYDEN. 2 Conveyance, in the last age, was the common term for sleight of hand. THE LIFE OF PLUTARCH. I KNOW not by what fate it comes to pass, that historians, who give immortality to others, are so ill requited by posterity, that their actions. and their fortunes are usually forgotten; neither themselves encouraged while they live, nor their memory preserved entire to future ages. It is the ingratitude of mankind to their greatest benefactors, that they who teach us wisdom by the surest ways, (setting before us what we ought to shun or to pursue, by the examples of the most famous men whom they record, and by the experience of their faults and virtues,) should generally live poor and unregarded; as if they were born only for the publick, and had no interest in their own well-being, but were to be lighted up like tapers, and to waste themselves for the benefit of others. But this is a complaint too general, and the custom has been too long established to be remedied; neither does it wholly reach our author. He was born in an age which was sensible of his virtue, and found a Trajan to reward him, as تا Aristotle did an Alexander. But the historians He was born at Charonea, a small city of Bæotia, in Greece, between Attica and Phocis, and reaching to both seas. The climate not much befriended by the heavens, for the air is thick and foggy; and consequently the inhabitants partaking of its influence, gross feeders and fat witted, brawny and unthinking,-just the constitution of heroes, cut out for the executive and brutal business of war; but so stupid in the designing part, that in all the revolutions of Greece they were never masters, but only in those few years when they were led by Epaminondas, or Pelopidas. Yet this foggy air, this country of fat weathers, as Juvenal calls it,' produced three wits, which were comparable to any three Athenians; cujus prudentia monstrat Summos posse viros, et magna exempla daturos, Verv cum in patriâ, crassoque sub aëre nasci. Juv. Sat. X. Pindar, Epaminondas," and our Plutarch; to whom we may add a fourth, Sextus Chæronensis, the preceptor of the learned Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the nephew of our author. Charonca, if we may give credit to Pausanias, in the ninth book of his description of Greece, was anciently called Arnè, from Arnè, the daughter of Æolus; but being situated to the west of Parnassus in that lowland country, the natural unwholesomeness of the air was augmented by the evening vapours cast upon it from that mountain, which our late travellers describe to be full of moisture and marshy ground enclosed in the inequality of its ascents; and being also exposed to the winds which blew from that quarter, the town was perpetually unhealthful; for which reason, says my author, Charon, the son of Apollo and Thero, made it be rebuilt, and turned it towards the rising sun, from whence the town became healthful, and consequently populous; in memory of which benefit it afterwards retained his name. But as etymologies are uncertain, and the Greeks, above all nations, given to fabulous derivations of names, especially when they tend to the honour of their country, I think we may be reasonably content to take the denomination of the town from 6 Pindar died 439 years before the birth of Christ, and Epaminondas 363: between the death of Epaminondas and the birth of Plutarch was an interval of about 414 ycars, during which long period the "country of fat weathers" appears to have lain quite fallow. its delightful or cheerful standing, as the word Chæron' sufficiently implies. But to lose no time in these grammatical etymologies, which are commonly uncertain guesses, it is agreed that Plutarch was here born; the year uncertain; but without dispute in the reign of Claudius. Joh. Gerrard Vossius has assigned his birth in the latter end of that Emperor; some other writers of his life have left it undecided whether then, or in the beginning of Nero's empire; but the most accurate Rualdus (as I find it in the Paris edition of Plutarch's works) has manifestly proved him to be born in the middle time of Claudius, or somewhat lower; for Plutarch, in the inscription at Delphos, (of which more hereafter,) remembers that Ammonius, his master, disputed with him and his brother Lamprias concerning it, when Nero made his progress into Greece, which was in his twelfth year; and the question disputed could not be managed with so much learning as it was, by mere boys; therefore he was then sixteen, or rather eighteen years of age. Xylander has observed that Plutarch himself, in • From xaip, gaudeo. According to this last supposition, Plutarch was born A. D. 48, in the sixth year of Claudius, and thirty-four years after the death of Augustus. If he was but fourteen when Nero entered Greece, (and he himself tells he was then very young,) his birth must be placed in the tenth year of Claudius, A. D. 52. |