TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL GREEK; WITH NOTES CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL, AND A LIFE OF PLUTARCH. BY JOHN LANGHORNE, D. D. AND WILLIAM LANGHORNE, A. M. A NEW EDITION, WITH CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS, BY THE REV. FRANCIS WRANGHAM, M. A. F. R. S. IN EIGHT VOLUMES. VOL. I. NEW-YORK: PUBLISHED BY SAMUEL CAMPBELL & SON; EVERT TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE VISCOUNT MILTON, ONE OF THE REPRESENTATIVES IN PARLIAMENT OF THE COUNTY OF YORK, &c. &c. MY DEAR LORD, When under the sanction of your Lordship's name I offer to the Public an edition of PLUTARCH's Lives of Illustrious Men, I am sensible that I place before them a melancholy series of instances, in which virtue was referred for her sole recompense to the recollection of her achievements, or to the consciousness of her purposes. To the eye of the multitude, this may appear to throw over her an unnatural and a discouraging gloom. But you, my Lord, inherit the talent of appreciating her value by better tests than that of her worldly brilliance. Allied by descent and substituted by delegation to men, for whose integrity, public and private, future PLUTARCHS may be at a loss to discover parallels, you have early been led into studies and reflections, which, though they have given poignancy to your regret, have mitigated your surprise at the sad and frequent spectacle of proscribed patriotism. You have followed ARISTIDES in his exile from Athens, and CAro in his retreat to Utica-but why do I draw exclusively from antiquity examples of national ingratitude ? You have wept over the uncommemorated martyrdom of a DE WITT, and have witnessed the calamitous abandonment, even by the people whom he loved and whom he served, of a Fox. |