Thou hast boasted and blustered and talked of One little hour of sleepless care,

POETRY.-At Port Royal, 1861, 434. Precious Time, 434.

SHORT ARTICLES.-The Late War with England, 450. Witch Stories, 450. Comfort for Bereaved Parents, 456. Mark Lemon's Lectures, 472. Composers charged with Plagiarism, 472.

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CORRECTION.-In No. 920, page 157, is a poem entitled "The Picket Guard," signed E. B., and erroneously credited to the Pittsburgh Christian Advocate. Is was written for Harper's Weekly, where it appeared 30 Nov. The author is Mrs. Ethelin Beers, who has published a clever story in Harper's Magazine for February.

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From The Quarterly Review. are read, no doubt, as aids to the study of Plutarch's Lives. The Translation called the originals; and some-like our Dryden's, corrected from the Greek and aces"-for the pleasure of seeing how far a revised by A. W. Clough, sometime Fel- delicate and difficult task has been overlow and Tutor of Oriel College, Oxford, come. We have plenty of "cribs," and we and late Professor of the English Lan- have a few works of art, of which last the guage and Literature at University ColAristophanes of Mr. Frere is (as far as it lege, London. In five volumes. 1859. goes) an unrivalled specimen. Where, however, is the mere stranger to look for translations which shall justify to him the tantalizing and provoking praise he hears on all hands of the antique men? They are not to be found.

THE appearance of a new version-as in some sort this is of the "Lives" of Plutarch, is not only a literary event, but one of no little historical importance. For Plutarch is not merely the first of biographers by right of having produced a great number of biographies of the first class, but he holds a position unique, peculiar, and entirely his own, in modern Europe. We have all "naturalized" the old gentleman, and admitted him to the rights of citizenship, from the Baltic to the Pillars of Hercules. He was a Greek, to be sure, and a Greek no doubt he is still. But as when we think of a Devereux or a Stanley we call him an Englishman, and not a Norman, so, who among the reading public troubles himself to reflect that Plutarch wrote Attic prose of such or such a quality? Scholars know all about it to be sure, as they know that the turkeys of our farmyards came originally from Mexico. Plutarch, however, is not a scholar's author, but is popular everywhere, as if he were a native. It is as though the drachmas which he carried in his purse on his travels were still current coin in the public markets and exchanges.

We are told by the literary historians that Plutarch was translated into modern Greek in the fourteenth century; and a pious archbishop of Heleno-Pontus had, three centuries earlier, expressed a hope of his eternal salvation conjointly with Plato.* But we do not find him quoted by our own chroniclers, as the Latin poets and Cicero sometimes are. His real glory begins with the revival of letters, when Latin versions of his "Lives" first appeared, and were followed by Greek editions (though not till early in the sixteenth century) both of the "Lives" and the "Morals." Plutarch, however, was destined to be famous through translations chiefly. The folios of Venice and Florence would get abroad, no doubt, and obtain their share of notice from the scholars who were now laboring like miners in the long-buried cities of antiquity. But the important day for Plutarch and the modern world was that on which the eyes of Now this, we repeat, is a unique phenom- Jacques Amyot, a French churchman, first enon. There is no other case of an ancient fell upon his text. Amyot was born at writer-whether Greek or Latin-becoming Melun, of humble parents, in 1513, (just as well known in translations as he was in the four years before the appearance of the classical world, or as great modern writers editio princeps of the "Lives," in Greek, at are in the modern one. Neither is there Florence), and studied at Melun, Paris, and another case of the world's accepting-as it Bourges. He held a chair in the last-named does with Plutarch's Lives-all translations town-thanks to the kindness of Margaret, with more or less thankfulness. Nor, again, sister of Francis I.; and some early versions will another instance be found of an ancient which he made from the "Lives" induced writer's forming so curious a link between that "humane great monarch" to present his world of thought and those who care for him to the Abbaye of Bellozane. He went nothing else but what he tells them about to Venice, attached to an ambassador, where or in that world. It is, indeed, wonderful he had no doubt access to important MSS. how little translators have yet achieved for of his favorite author. He was for some the classical men; and this fact might well time at the Council of Trent. He received deserve serious consideration in our age. something from each of several successive Pope's "Homer "is, perhaps, our most pop-kings of France, and died a bishop, rich and ular translation. But is there any other renowned, in 1583. Such is a brief sumversion of an ancient much read? Some! *Fabricius, Bibl. Græc., ed. Harles, v. 156.

mary of the career of a man to whom Plutarch owes his modern fame, and to whom the modern world owes Plutarch. But Amyot's literary merits do not even stop here. He is one of the earliest writers of attractive French prose. He had an immense influence on Montaigne; and, what is still more important, our own countryman, Sir Thomas North, translated from Amyot's translation, and supplied Shakspeare with the groundwork of his "Coriolanus," "Julius Cæsar," and "Antony and Cleopatra." Very few men of letters have done so much for the world as Jacques Amyot, bishop of Auxerre.

frequently garnish their descriptions with allusions to their mighty names. But all was dark and shadowy about them, and they wore always a quasi-feudal garb, just as the Virgin Mary was spoken of as "a princess of coat-armor" by our countrywoman Dame Juliana Berners. In Shakspeare's "Troilus and Cressida," with its "Lord Æneas," we see the influence of the mediæval view of the ancients; but when he writes from Plutarch, they become different men. It was Amyot that worked this change, by showing them in their real characters as described by an ancient in a civilized age.

We must not be surprised then to hear that Amyot's "Plutarch" was the favorite reading of Henri Quatre, nor that De Retz found only among the "men of Plutarch" parallels to the heroic Montrose. Homme de Plutarque became indeed a typical description in France, as we name plants after their discoverers and classifiers. Amyot might be superseded by Dacier, but Plutarch was still read by the generation of Rousseau, who himself sat up till sunrise over the old Baotian's page. Later still, whatever varnish of classicality adorned the heads of the "revolutionary heroes" seems to have come from the same inexhaustible source. We know that this has been urged against the Plutarchian influence. But the answer is, that without it the "heroes" would have been still more brutal and vulgar than some of them were. The "Gracchus " and " Hampden" of our own Sunday papers are very unlike the children of Cornelia or the landholder of Bucks; they bear the names with much the same appropriateness that negroes do Cæsar and Pompey. It would, however, he too extravagant, we venture to

Amyot finished the "Lives" before the "Morals," and published them in 1559. It was the year that Mary Stuart's first boyhusband died; and Montaigne was a young gentleman of twenty-six. By and by the "Morals" appeared, and made Montaigne an essayist—so at least he tells us himself; for Plutarch and Seneca, he says, formed him, and he preferred Plutarch of the two. "I draw from them," are his words, "like the Danaides, filling and emptying, sans cesse." He read no books so much as Plutarch's "Lives" and "Morals," and especially admired the "Comparisons" in the "Lives,"" the fidelity and sincerity of which equal their profundity and weight." And he further expressly tells us that he read them in Amyot, "to whom I give the palm over all our French writers, not only for the naïveté and purity of his language, but for having had the wisdom to select so worthy a book." Montaigne had, indeed, some personal acquaintance with Amyot; aud it is a fact that he quotes Plutarch no less than two hundred times. As every essayist traces his pedigree to Montaigne, what a noble, flour-think, to decline studying on that account ishing tree must that be esteemed which rooted itself and spread its healthy green leaves in Charonea in the first century!

the historians of the Roman Republic or the English Civil War.

Amyot's folios, we say, were popular; and in time it occurred to an Elizabethan knight, Sir Thomas North, to translate them. Sir Thomas was a collateral ancestor of the Guildford family, being a younger son of Edward, the first Lord North, and studied at Lincoln's Inn in the reign of Philip and Mary. But this is nearly all we know of his personal history. In a late edition of his

Amyot's folios were popular-strange as popular folio sounds to us. The fact is, that this was the first time that the gentlemen of feudal Europe made the personal acquaintance of the gentlemen of classical Europe. Of course there had always been a vague traditionary knowledge of the Roman and Greek heroes. Niebuhr remarks that stories about them used to be read out of Valerius" Plutarch's Lives," dedicating afresh to Maximus to the German knights as they sat at dinner; and the medieval chroniclers

Queen Elizabeth, he speaks of " the princely bounties of your blessed hand. . . comfort