Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/16

x but in all that he attempted. He had a positive genius for style, the distinguished Tudor style, so full of music, so rich, so ardent. He has none of the "concinnity" (to use such a word) of the writers of a succeeding date; he produced his effects by means familiar enough to Jeremy Taylor, to Hooker, to Milton, but alien from the austerity of his models as from the fashion of essayists trained in the later French school.

Old Thomas Fuller, in discoursing upon Holland, declared "that the books alone of his turning into English will make a country gentleman a complete library for historians." Be that as it may—and the implied compliment has something of a double edge—we may safely accept the dictum of a just and clear-sighted modern critic when he says: "Philemon Holland still remains the first translator of his age; and if the Bible is the Shakespeare of translation, then Philemon Holland is the ingenious Ben Jonson of a splendid craft."

Curiously, little is known of the life of Plutarch, considering his fame both in ancient and modern times. The main facts appear to be as follows: He was born somewhere about A.D. 50, at Chæronea, in Bœotia. He studied at Athens under Ammonius, a philosopher of some distinction at the time, whose lectures and teaching gave a lasting bent to his pupil's mind; for Plutarch was nothing if not a moral philosopher. The aim of his life, as it has been justly said, was the illumination of mind by morality; even his biographies are ethical.

He travelled a little, visiting, among other places, Egypt. But it was with Italy, and Rome, that he became most familiar, and his sojourn in the great metropolis—where he gave lectures on philosophical questions—was, doubtless, a determining factor in his own intellectual life. At Rome he contracted a number of friendships, though his lack of acquaintance with Latin literature may have deprived him of the full value of such friendship, from the purely intellectual standpoint.

On returning to his native town Plutarch devoted himself not merely to writing biographies and essays, but to the active business of civic life, even in the circumscribed sphere in which