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.”  But if they are borrowed, they have none of the discordant effect of the purpureus pannus, for the warm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes them his own.  Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly original.  Who ever remembered so much and yet so well?  It is this selectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the natural elevation of his mind.  He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things.  We are speaking of him, of course, at his best.  Many of his essays are trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has flowed down through auriferous soil.  “We sail on his memory into the ports of every nation,” says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction to Goodwin’s Plutarch’s “Morals.”  No doubt we are becalmed pretty often, and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation, so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and quotation.

It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser, in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whose mind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative (if we take the “Lives” and the “Morals” together) in the thought and action of men than any other single author, ancient or modern.  And on the whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogether good, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning them over to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity.  And so wide was his own curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to their purpose in his discursive pages.  For he was equally at home among men and ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other.  His influence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of any other ancient author except Aesop.