If we are in the
_atrium_ (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the
great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and
who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become
human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his
lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible
virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion,
patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which
associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is
theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson
disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian
unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended
him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints
which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch
in the essay on "Physiognomy." After speaking of some "escripts encores
plus reverez," he asks, in his idiomatic way, "a, quoy faire nous allons
nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?" More than this, however,
Montaigne liked him because he was _good talk_, as it is called, a
better companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which are
noble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation
between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his style
is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in
Plutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived
perhaps from authors much more ancient.
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