ssing through the mint of his brain, came out thence stamped coin,
current for all time. Viewing some of his plays, it may be said, with no
real, though with apparent contradiction, that no man ever borrowed more
from books, and yet none ever owed less to them. For the Roman times
Plutarch served him, as Holinshed and Hall supplied him for his English
histories. Under Plutarch's guidance he walked through the streets of
ancient Rome, and became familiar with the conduct of her men. He is
more Roman than Plutarch himself, and by divine right of imagination he
makes himself a citizen of the Eternal City. While Shakespeare was using
Plutarch to such advantage, on the other hand, Ben Jonson seems to have
borrowed little or nothing from him in his Roman plays. He got what he
wanted out of the Latin authors, and he succeeded in Latinizing his
plays,--in giving to his characters the dress, but not the spirit of
Rome.

It was toward the end of the seventeenth century that Dryden's
translation appeared, and for about fifty years it held much the same
place with the reading public that North's had filled for previous
generations. It was, no doubt, in this version that Mrs. Fitzpatrick
amused herself during her seclusion in Ireland, as she tells Sophia
Western, with reading "a great deal in Plutarch's Lives." But this was
at length superseded by the translation of the brothers Langhorne,
which, spite of its want of vivacity, its labored periods, and formal
narrative, has retained its place as the popular version of Plutarch up
to the present day. One can hardly help wishing--so little of Plutarch's
spirit survives in their dull pages--that a similar fate had overtaken
these excellent men to that which carried off the gentle Abbe Ricard
with the _grippe_, when he had published but half of his translation of
the Philosopher of Cheronaea.

It is a proof of the intrinsic charm of Plutarch's Lives, that thus,
notwithstanding the imperfect manner in which they have been, up to this
time, presented to English readers, they should have been so constantly
and so generally read.[E] They have given equal delight to all ages and
to all classes. The heavy folio has been taken from its place on the
lower shelves in the quiet libraries of English country-houses, and been
read by old men at their firesides, by girls in trim gardens, by boys
who cared for no other classic. The cheap double-column octavo has
travelled in peddlers' carts to all the