Plutarch[vii:2] was born, about the middle of the first Christian century, at Cheroneia in Boeotia, where he spent the greater part of his life, and where he probably died. The precise dates of his birth and death are unknown; but he can hardly have been born earlier than A. D. 45, and he must have lived nearly or quite till A. D. 120, as some of his works contain references to events that cannot have taken place earlier than the second decade of the second century. We know little of him from other sources, much from his own writings. There may have been many such men in his time; but antiquity has transmitted to us no record like his. He reminds one of such men as were to be found half a century ago in many of our American country towns. Those potentially like them have now, for the most part, emigrated to the large cities, and have become very unlike their prototypes. Cheroneia, with its great memories, was a small and insignificant town, and Plutarch was a country gentleman, superior, as in culture so in serviceableness, to all his fellow citizens, holding the foremost place in municipal affairs, liberal, generous, chosen to all local offices of honor, and especially of trust and responsibility, associating on the most pleasant terms with the common people, always ready to give them his advice and aid, and evidently respected and beloved by all. He belonged to an old and distinguished family, and seems always to have possessed a competency for an affluent, though sober, domestic establishment and style of living, and for an unstinted hospitality. He was probably the richest man in his native city; for he assigns as a reason for not leaving it and living at some centre of intellectual activity, that Cheroneia could not afford to lose the property which he would take with him in case of his removal.

He had what corresponds to our university education, at Athens, under the Peripatetic philosopher Ammonius. He also visited Alexandria, then a renowned seat of learning; but how long he stayed there, or whether he extended his Egyptian travel beyond that city, we have no means of knowing. There is no proof of his having been in Rome or in Italy more than once, and that was when he was about forty years of age. He went to Rome on public business, probably in behalf of his native city, and remained there long enough to become acquainted with some eminent men, to make himself known as a scholar and an ethical philosopher, and to deliver lectures that attracted no little public notice. This visit seems to have been the great event of his life, as a winter spent in Boston or New York used to be in the life of one of our country gentlemen before the time of railways.

He had a wife, who appears to have been of a character kindred to his own; at least five children, of whom two sons, if not more, lived to be themselves substantial citizens and worthy members of society; and two brothers, who seem to have possessed his full confidence and warm affection. He was singularly happy in his relations to a large circle of friends, especially in Athens, for which he had the lifelong love that students in our time acquire for a university town. He was archon, or mayor, of Cheroneia, probably more than once,—the office having doubtless been annual and elective,—and in this capacity he entered, like a veritable country magistrate, into material details of the public service, superintending, as he says, the measuring of tiles and the delivery of stone and mortar for municipal uses. He officiated for many years as priest of Apollo at Delphi, and as such gave several sumptuous entertainments. Indeed, hospitality of this sort appears, so far as we can see, to have been the sole or chief duty of his priestly office. As an adopted citizen of one of the Athenian tribes, he was not infrequently a guest at civic banquets and semi-civic festivals.

As regards Plutarch’s philosophy, it is easier to say to which of the great schools he did not belong than to determine by what name he would have preferred to be called. He probably would have termed himself a Platonist, but not, like Cicero, of the New Academy, which had incorporated Pyrrhonism with the provisional acceptance of the Platonic philosophy. At the same time, he was a closer follower and a more literal interpreter of Plato than were the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, who had not yet become a distinctly recognized sect, and who in many respects were the precursors of the mysticism of the Reformation era. Plutarch, with Plato, recognized two eternities: that of the Divine Being, supremely good and purely spiritual; and that of matter, as, if not intrinsically evil, the cause, condition, and seat of all evil, and as at least opposing such obstacles to its own best ideal manipulation that the Divine Being could not embody his pure and perfect goodness, unalloyed by evil, in any material form. Herein the Platonists were at variance with both the Stoics and the Epicureans. The Stoics regarded matter as virtually an emanation from the Supreme Being, who is not only the universal soul and reason, but the creative fire, which, transformed into air and water,—part of the water becoming earth,—is the source of the material universe, which must at the end of a certain cosmical cycle be re-absorbed into the divine essence, whence will emanate in endless succession new universes to replace those that pass away. The Epicureans, on the other hand, believed in the existence of matter only, and regarded mind and soul as the ultimate product of material organization.

In one respect Plutarch transcends Plato, and, so far as I know, all pre-Christian philosophers. Plato’s theism bears a close kindred to pantheism. His God, if I may be permitted the phrase, is only semi-detached. He becomes the creator rather by blending his essence with eternal matter, than by shaping that matter to his will. He is rather in all things than above all things, rather the Soul of the universe than its sovereign Lord. But in Plutarch’s writings the Supreme Being is regarded as existing independently of material things; they, as subject to his will, not as a part of his essence.

Plutarch was, like Plato, a realist. He regarded the ideas or patterns of material things, that is, genera, or kinds of objects, as having an actual existence (where or how it is hard to say), as projected from the Divine Mind, floating somewhere in ethereal spaces between the Deity and the material universe,—the models by which all things in the universe are made.

As to Plutarch’s theology, he was certainly a monotheist. He probably had some vague belief in inferior deities (daemons he would have called them), as holding a place like that filled by angels and by evil spirits in the creed of most Christians; yet it is entirely conceivable that his occasional references to these deities are due merely to the conventional rhetoric of his age. His priesthood of the Delphian Apollo can hardly be said to have been a religious office. It was rather a post of dignity and honor, which a gentleman of respectable standing, courteous manners, and hospitable habits might creditably fill, even though he had no faith in Apollo. But that Plutarch had a serious, earnest, and efficient faith in the one Supreme God, in the wise and eternal Providence, and in the Divine wisdom, purity, and holiness, we have in his writings an absolute certainty. Nor can we find, even in Christian literature, the record of a firmer belief than his in human immortality, and in a righteous retribution beginning in this world and reaching on into the world beyond death.

But Plutarch was, most of all, an ethical philosopher. Yet here again he cannot be classed as belonging to any school. For Epicureanism he has an intense abhorrence, and regards the doctrines of that sect as theoretically absurd and practically demoralizing. He maintains that the disciples of Epicurus, as such, utterly fail in the quest of pleasure, or what according to their master is still better, painlessness: for the condition of those who, as he says, “swill the mind with the pleasures of the body, as hogherds do their swine,” cannot entirely smother the sense of vacuity and need; nor is it possible by any appliances of luxury to cut off even sources of bodily disquietude, which are only the more fatal to the happiness of him who seeks bodily well-being alone; while the prospect of annihilation at death deprives those necessarily unhappy in this life of their only solace, and gives those who live happily here the discomfort of anticipating the speedy and entire loss of all that has ministered to their enjoyment.

In Plutarch’s moderation, his avoidance of extreme views, and his just estimate of happiness as an end, though not the supreme end, of being, he is in harmony with the Peripatetics, among whom his Athenian preceptor was the shining light of his age; but his ethical system was much more strict and uncompromising than theirs, and I cannot find that he quotes them or refers to them as a distinct school of philosophy. In matters appertaining to physical science he indeed often cites Aristotle, but not, I think, in a single instance, as to any question in morals.

As regards the Stoics, Plutarch writes against them, but chiefly against dogmas which in his time had become nearly obsolete,—namely, that all acts not in accordance with the absolute right are equally bad; that all virtuous acts are equally good; that there is no intermediate moral condition between that of the wise or perfectly good man and that of the utterly vicious; and that outward circumstances neither enhance nor diminish the happiness of the truly wise man. These extravagances do not appear in the writings of Seneca, nor in Epictetus as reported by Arrian, and Plutarch in reasoning against them is controverting Zeno rather than his later disciples. He is in full sympathy with the Stoics as to their elevated moral standard, though without the sternness and rigidness which had often characterized their professed beliefs and their public teaching, yet of which there remained few vestiges among his contemporaries. With the utmost mildness and gentleness, he manifests everywhere an inflexibility of principle and a settled conviction as to the rightfulness or wrongfulness of specific acts which might satisfy the most rigid Stoic, and in which he plants himself as firmly on the ground of the eternal Right as if his philosophy had been founded on a distinctively Christian basis.

Indeed, Plutarch is so often decidedly Christian in spirit, and in many passages of his writings there is such an almost manifest transcript of the thought of the Divine Founder of our religion, that it has been frequently maintained that he drew from Christian sources. This, I must believe, is utterly false in the sense in which it is commonly asserted, yet in a more recondite sense true. If Plutarch had known anything about Christians or the Christian Scriptures, he could not have failed to refer to them; for he is constantly making references to contemporary persons and objects, sects and opinions. We know of no Christian church at Cheroneia in that age, and indeed it is exceedingly improbable that there should have been one in so small a town. The circulation of thought, and consequently the diffusion of a new religion from the great centres of population to outlying districts or villages, was infinitesimally slow. Our word pagan is an enduring witness of this tardiness of transmission. It had its birth (in its present sense) after Christianity had become the legally established religion of the Empire, and had supplanted heathen temples and rites in the cities, while in the pagi, or villages, the old gods were still in the ascendant. There were indeed Christian churches in Athens and in Rome; but they would most probably have eluded the curiosity and escaped the knowledge of a temporary resident, especially as most of their chief members were either Jews or slaves. Yet I cannot doubt that an infusion of Christianity had somehow infiltrated itself into Plutarch’s ethical opinions and sentiments, as into those of Seneca, who has been represented as an acquaintance and correspondent of St. Paul, though it is historically almost impossible that the two men ever saw or heard of each other.

In one respect, the metaphor by which we call the Author of our religion the Sun of Righteousness has a special aptness. The sun, unlike lesser luminaries, lights up sheltered groves and grottos that are completely dark under the full moon, and sends its rays through every chink and cranny of roof or wall. In like manner there seems to have been an indirect and tortuous transmission of Christian thought into regions where its source was wholly unknown. In the ethical writings of the post-Christian philosophers, of Plutarch, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, there may be traced a loftiness, precision, delicacy, tenderness, breadth of human sympathy, and recognition of holiness in the Divine Being as the archetype of human purity, transcending all that is most admirable in pre-Christian moralists. Thus, while I cannot but regard Cicero’s “De Officiis” as in many respects the world’s master-work in ethical philosophy, containing fewer unchristian sentences than I could number on the fingers of one hand, there is nothing in it that reminds me of the Gospels; while these others often shape their thoughts in what seem to be evangelic moulds.

Now I think that we may account for the large diffusion of Christian thought and sentiment among persons who knew not Christianity even by name. The new religion was very extensively embraced among slaves in all parts of the Roman Empire, and slave then meant something very different from what it means now. It is an open question whether there was not, at least out of Greece, more of learning, culture, and refinement in the slave than in the free population of the Empire. We must remember how many illustrious names in Greek and Roman literature—such names as those of Aesop, Terence, Epictetus—belonged to slaves. Tiro, Cicero’s slave, was not only one of his dearest friends, but foremost among his literary confidants and advisers. Most of the rich men who had any love of literature owned their librarians and their copyists, and the teachers of the children were generally the property of the father. Among Christian slaves there were undoubtedly many who felt no call to martyrdom, (which can have been incumbent on them only when the alternative was apostasy and denial of their faith,) who therefore made no open profession of their religion, while in precept, conversation, and life they were imbued with its spirit,—a spirit as subtile in its penetrating power as it is refining and purifying in its influence. From the lips of Christian slaves many children, no doubt, received in classic forms moral precepts redolent of the aroma breathed from the Sermon on the Mount. If the social medium which Plutarch represents is a fair specimen of the best rural society of the Empire in his time, there must have been a ready receptivity for the highest style of ethical teaching,—a genial soil for the germination of a truly evangelic righteousness of moral conception, maxim, and principle.

Probably no book except the Bible has had more readers than Plutarch’s Lives. These biographies have been translated into every language of the civilized world; they have been among the earliest and most fascinating books for children and youth of many successive generations; and down to the present time, when fiction seems to have almost superseded history and biography, and to have destroyed the once universal appetency for them among young people, they have exercised to a marvellous degree a shaping power over character. They are, indeed, underrated by the exact historian, because modern research has discovered here and there some mistake in the details of events. But such mistakes were in that age inevitable. Historical criticism was then an unknown science. Documents and traditions covering the same ground were deemed of equal value when they were in harmony, and when they differed an author followed the one which best suited his taste, or his purpose for the time being. Thus Cicero, in one case, in the same treatise gives three different versions of the same story. Thus, too, there were several stories afloat about the fate of Regulus; but Roman writers took that which Niebuhr thinks farthest from the truth, yet which threw the greatest odium on the hated name of Carthage. Now I have no doubt that, whenever there were two or more versions of the same act or event, Plutarch chose that which would best point his moral. But it is only in few and unimportant particulars that he has been proved to be inaccurate.

It has been also objected to Plutarch, that he attaches less importance to the achievements of his heroes in war and in civic life, than to traits and anecdotes illustrative of their characters. This seems to me a feature which adds not only to the charm of these Lives, but even more to their historical value. The events of history are at once the outcome and the procreant cradle of character, and we know nothing of any period or portion of history except as we know the men who made it and the men whom it made. Biography is the soul; history the body, which it tenants and animates, and which, when not thus tenanted, is a heap of very dry bones. The most thorough knowledge of the topography of Julius Caesar’s battles in Gaul, the minutest description of the campaign that terminated in Pharsalia, the official journal of the Senate during his dictatorship, would tell us very little about him and his time. But a vivid sketch of his character, with well-chosen characteristic anecdotes, would give us a very distinct and realizing conception of the antecedent condition of things that made a life like his possible, and of his actual influence for good and for evil on his country and his age.

Nor is the value of such a biography affected in the least by any doubts that we may entertain as to the authenticity of incidents, trivial except as illustrative of character, which occupy a large space in Plutarch’s Lives. Indeed, the least authentic may be of the greatest historical value. An anecdote may be literally true, and yet some peculiar combination of circumstances may have led him of whom it is told to speak or act out of character. But a mythical anecdote of a man, coming down from his own time and people, must needs owe its origin and complexion to his known character.

It is perfectly easy to see throughout these biographies the author’s didactic aim. If I may use sacred words, here by no means misapplied, his prime object was “reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.” He evidently felt and mourned the degeneracy of his age, was profoundly aware of the worth of teaching by example, and was solicitous to bring from the past such elements of ethical wisdom as the records of illustrious men could be made to render up. True to this purpose, he measures the moral character of such transactions as he relates by the highest standard of right which he knows, and there is not a person or deed that fails to bear the stamp, clear-cut, yet seldom obtrusive, of his approval or censure.

The Lives, though the best known of Plutarch’s writings, are but a small part of them, and hardly half of those still extant. His other works are generally grouped under the title of “Moralia,”[xx:1] or Morals, though among them there are many treatises that belong to the department of history or biography, some to that of physics. Most of these works are short; a few, of considerable length. Some of them may have been lectures; some are letters of advice or of consolation; some are in a narrative form; many are in the form of dialogue, which, sanctioned by the prestige of Plato’s pre-eminence, was very largely employed by philosophers of later times, possessing, as it does, the great advantage of putting opposite and diverse opinions in the mouths of interlocutors, and thus giving to the treatise the vivacity and the dramatic interest of oral discussion. Some of these dialogues have a symposium, or supper party, for their scene, and introduce a numerous corps of speakers. In these Plutarch himself commonly sustains a prominent part, and the members of his family often have their share in the conversation, or are the subjects of kindly mention. In several instances the occasion, circumstances, and conversation are described so naturally as to make it almost certain that the author simply wrote out from memory what was actually said. At any rate, these festive dialogues present very clearly his idea of what a symposium ought to be, and in its entire freedom from excess and extravagance of any kind it would bear the strictest ordeal with all modern moralists, the extreme ascetics alone excepted.

Had not the Lives been written, I am inclined to believe that the Moralia alone would have given Plutarch as high a place as he now holds, not only in the esteem of scholars, but in the interest and delight of all readers of good books; and I am sure that there is no loving reader of the Lives who will not be thankful to have his attention drawn to the Moralia. They exhibit throughout the same moral traits which their author shows as a biographer. He treats, indeed, incidentally, of some subjects which a purer ethical taste in the public mind might have excluded. He recognizes the existence of immoralities, which, not discreditable in the best society of unevangelized Greece and Rome, have almost lost their place and name in Christendom. Some of his dialogues have among the interlocutors those with whom as good a man as he would in our time associate only in the hope of converting them. But his own opinion and feeling on all moral questions are uniformly and explicitly in behalf of all that is pure, and true, and right, and reverent.

Many of these Moralia are on what are commonly, yet wrongly, called the minor morals, that is, on the evils that most of all infest and destroy the happiness of families and the peace of society, and on the opposite virtues,—on such subjects, for instance, as “Idle Talking,” “Curiosity,” “Self-Praise,” and the like. Others are on such grave topics as “The Benefits that a Man may derive from his Enemies,” and “The Best Means of Self-Knowledge.” There is in all these treatises a large amount of blended common sense and keen ethical insight; and so little does human nature change with its surroundings that the greater part of Plutarch’s cautions, counsels, and precepts are as closely applicable to our own time as if they had been written yesterday.

One of the most remarkable writings in this collection is Plutarch’s letter to his wife on the death of a daughter two years old, during his absence from home. It not only expresses sweetly and lovingly the topics of consolation which would most readily occur to a Christian father; it gives us also a charming picture of a household united by ties of spiritual affinity, and living in a purer, higher medium than that of affluence and luxury. A few sentences may convey something of the tone and spirit of this epistle. “Since our little daughter afforded us the sweetest and most charming pleasure, so ought we to cherish her memory, which will conduce in many ways, or rather many fold, more to our joy than our grief.” “They who were present at the funeral report this with admiration, that you neither put on mourning, nor disfigured yourself or any of your maids, neither were there any costly preparations nor magnificent pomp; but all things were managed with silence and moderation, in the presence of our relatives alone.” “So long as she is gone to a place where she feels no pain, why should we grieve for her?” “This is the most troublesome thing in old age, that it makes the soul weak in its remembrance of divine things, and too earnest for things relating to the body.” “But that which is taken away in youth, being more soft and tractable, soon returns to its native vigor and beauty.” “It is good to pass the gates of death before too great a love of bodily and earthly things be engendered in the soul.” “It is an impious thing to lament for those whose souls pass immediately into a better and more divine state.” “Wherefore let us comply with custom in our outward and public behavior, and let our interior be more unpolluted, pure and holy.”

Now, when I remember that in the pre-Christian Greek and Roman world the strongest utterances about immortality had been by Socrates, if Plato reported him aright, when he expressed strong hope of life beyond death, yet warned his friends not to be too confident about a matter so wrapped in uncertainty,—and by Cicero, who, when his daughter died, confessed that his reasonings had left no conviction in his own mind,—I cannot doubt that some Easter morning rays had pierced the dense Boeotian atmosphere, and that the risen Saviour had in that lovely Cheroneian household those whom he designates as “other sheep, not of this fold.”

There is among the Moralia another letter of consolation, to Apollonius on the death of his son, longer, more elaborate, and evidently intended as a literary composition, to be preserved with the author’s other works, which breathes the same spirit of submission and trust.

Another of the Moralia, which has a special interest as regards the author’s own family, is on the “Training of Children,”—a series of counsels—including the careful heed of the parents to their own moral condition and habits—to which the experience of these intervening centuries has little to add, while it could find nothing to take away.

In one sense, the miscellanies brought together under the name of “Moralia” bear that title not inappropriately; for, as I have intimated, Plutarch could not but be didactic in whatever he wrote, and the ethical feeling, spirit, and purpose are perpetually, yet never ostentatiously or inappropriately, coming to the surface on all kinds of subjects. But there is a great deal in the collection not professedly or directly ethical. There are many scraps of history and biography, and a very large number and variety of characteristic anecdotes, both of well-known personages, and of others who are made known to us almost as vividly by a single trait, deed, or saying as if we had their entire life-record. There is an invaluable series of “Apophthegms”[xxv:1] of kings and great commanders,[xxv:2] and another of “Laconic [or Spartan] Apophthegms,” which are much more than their name implies, some of them being condensed memoirs. There are, also, several papers that give us more definite notions than can be found anywhere else of the science and natural history of the author’s time. Withal, we have here so many references to manners, customs, and habits, such pictures of home with all that could give it the sweetness and grace that belong to it, such views of society, both in city and in country, in ordinary intercourse and on festive occasions, that one can learn more of life in that age in the Roman Empire from these volumes than from any other single author; and the writer of a book like Becker’s “Gallus” might find here almost all the materials that he would need, except for the delineation of the night-side of Roman extravagance, gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, and depravity, which came not within Plutarch’s experience.

The most remarkable of all Plutarch’s writings, the most valuable equally in a philosophical and an ethical point of view, and the most redolent of what we almost involuntarily call Christian sentiment, is that “On the Delay of the Divine Justice,” or, to give a more literal translation of the original title, “Concerning those who are punished slowly by the Divine [Being].”[xxvi:1] It treats of what from the earliest time has been a mystery to serious minds, and has been urged equally by malignant irreligion and by honest scepticism against the supremacy of the Divine justice in the government of the world; namely, the postponement of the penal consequences of guilt, sometimes till there are no witnesses of the crime left to behold the punishment, sometimes till the offender himself has lost the thread between the evil that he did and its retribution, sometimes till the sinner has gone to the grave in peace, and left innocent posterity to suffer for his sins. Plutarch, with his unquestioning faith in immortality, doubts not that guilt, unpunished in this life, will be overtaken by just retribution in the life to come. But, as he says, retribution, though it may be consummated only in the future life, is not delayed till then. It seems late, because it lasts long. The sentence is passed upon the guilt when it is committed; and, however its visible execution may be postponed, the sinner is from that moment a prisoner of the Divine justice, awaiting execution. He may give splendid suppers, and live luxuriously; yet still he is within prison walls from which there is no escape.

This is undoubtedly true, and yet there are many cases, and those of the worst kind, in which it seems to be not true. A moderately bad man, in most instances, feels profoundly the shame and misery that he has brought upon himself. But a thoroughly wicked man takes contentedly a position which we may fitly term sub-human. If we suppose a man possessed of a magnificent house, luxuriously and tastefully furnished, who yet chooses never to ascend a stair, and lives in the basement shabbily and meanly, with the coarsest appliances of physical comfort, we might take him as the type of not a few bad men who seem entirely at their ease. They live in the basement. They have thrown away the key to the upper rooms. They have lost all appreciation of the higher, better modes of human living, and they are contented and satisfied as a well-fed beast is, in the absence of all spiritual cravings and ambitions. But this life, poor and mean as it is at the best, becomes still more narrow and sordid with the lapse of time. Many have looked with envy on prosperous guilt early or midway in its career; none can have witnessed its lengthened age without pity and loathing. Especially is this the case with the several forms of sensual vice. As age advances, the power of enjoyment wanes, while the morbid craving grows, even under the consciousness of added misery with its continued indulgence. The body becomes the soul’s dungeon, and its walls thicken inward and close up the wonted entrances of enjoyment. The senses, deadened on the side of pleasure, no longer avenues of beauty or of harmony, seem to serve only as means of prolonging a death in life, and as open inlets of discomfort and pain.

But the suspense of sentence has in not a few cases, according to Plutarch, a directly merciful purpose. As the most fertile soil may before tillage produce the rankest weeds, so in the soul most capable of good there may be, prior to culture, a noisome crop of evil, and yet God may spare the sinner for the good that is in him, and for the signal service which, when reclaimed, he may render to mankind. Then, too, by the delay of visible judgment God gives men in his own example the lesson of long-suffering, and rebukes their promptness in resentment and revenge. Still further, when penalty appears to fall on the posterity or successors of the guilty, and a race, a people, a city, or a family seems punished for the iniquity of its progenitors, Plutarch brings out very fully and clearly the absolutely essential and necessary solidarity of the family or the community, which can hardly fail so to inherit of its ancestors in disposition and character as to invite upon itself, to merit for itself, or at best to need as preventive or cure, the penal consequences of ancestral guilt.

This essay is all the more valuable because not written by a Christian. It shows that the intense stress laid by Christian teaching on a righteous retribution lasting on beyond the death-change is not a mere dogma of the sacred records of our religion, but equally the postulate of the unsophisticated reason and conscience of developed humanity.

My translation is not literal, in the common meaning of that term. If it were so, it would be unintelligible; for Plutarch’s style lacks simplicity, and his sentences, though seldom obscure, are often involved and intricate, sometimes elliptical. I have, however, given a faithful transcript in English of what I understand Plutarch to have written, omitting no thought or shade of thought that I suppose to be his, and inserting none of my own.

I have used Wyttenbach’s edition of the Moralia, departing from his text in but a single instance, and that, one in which he pronounces the reading in the text impossible, and suggests a conjectural reading as necessary to the sense of the passage. I have also made constant reference to the late Professor Hackett’s edition of this treatise, which it is superfluous to commend where he was known; for not only was he confessedly among the foremost scholars of his time, but his exacting conscientiousness would not suffer him to put less than his best and most thorough work into whatever came from his hands.

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