Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/84

Rh of Plutarch at that time. The active and inquiring minds of the Elizabethans enjoyed Plutarch as an all-round man. He satisfied their intellectual curiosity on many points. Besides, Plutarch was the most fortunate of the Greeks in contemporary translation. Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, from the French of Jacques Amyot, was called The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, and came out in 1579, with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth. It was written in simple, idiomatic, picturesque prose, the best English prose that had been written up to that time. As is well known, North's Plutarch was Shakspere's storehouse of classical learning. Page after page of the 'lives' of Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus in Shakspere is simply the noble English of North's narrative animated with the life and play of dialogue. North's masterly manner in prose was to develop into Bacon himself and into the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible. Bacon read Greek and may have quoted the Plutarch's Lives from that reading, but it is more than likely that he used one of the four editions of North's translations that appeared during his lifetime. He was certainly familiar with The Philosophie, commonly called the Morals, written by the learned philosopher Plutarch, and translated from the Greek, in 1603, by Philemon Holland, with a dedication to James I.

In general reading, Bacon quotes of the Fathers, St. Augustine, Of Truth, and St. Bernard, Of Unity in Religion and Of Atheism. Of Rh