Moralia

PLUTARCH - INTRODUCTION — signated not inaptly by Fuller as the translator-general of his age, was born at Chelmsford in I 552, the year of Spensers birth, and twelve years before Shakespeare. He was educated at Chelmsford Grammar School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a pupil of Whitgift, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He not only took his degree of M. A., but, later in life, graduated M. D. As no record of this degree is to be found in the Oxford or Cambridge registers, it has been thought that it was conferred upon him either at a Scotch or Continental University. Soon after taking his M. D., Holland settled at Coventry, which was to be his home till he died in 1637 the year of Ben Jonsons death. His medical practice being small, he eked out his time and a somewhat precarious income by devoting himself to translations of the classics. The chief of these translations, published in vast folios that are nowadays somewhat scarce and difficult to procure, are Liwy, Ammianus Marcellinus, Plinys Natural History, Suetonzzcs, and the Morals of Plutarch. The most popular of these versions was, perhaps, the Pliny, issued in two folios in 1601. The Plutarch was published two years later twenty years after his death it was re-issued, in a revised and corrected form, we are told. Since then it has not been reprinted until now the present volume is a selection from the moral essays of the popular Greek writer, whose Parallel Lives, as Englished by North, have become an English classic. In the year 1608, Holland, already famous as a translator even in an age of famous translations, became usher of the free school at Coventry twenty years later he was appointed to theheadmastership. He was an old man at the time of his appointment and the duties-at any time irksome to a scholar of his parts-must have proved too exhausting. Whatever be the cause, he resigned the post at the end of ten months. The remainder of his life was clouded by pecuniary anxieties. The res angusta domi was, unhappily, no trifling nor temporary discomfort, aggravated as it was by failing health. It is, however, to be remarked that in 1632 a small S vii Plutarchs Morals pension-a pittance, rather-was awarded him by the city he had served so well both in scholastic and civic capacities and not long afterwards, in consideration of his learning and worthy parts, he received some monetary assistance from Magdalene College, Cambridge. It was not creditable that his own college, the royal and religious foundation of Trinity, apparently made no provision for her distinguished alumnus, despite his evident claims on her liberality. Holland was, almost to the end, an indefatigable student. His contemporaries, prone to notice such trivialities, remarked inter alia that he never wore spectacles and it was commonly reported that he wrote one of his folios with a single quill pen. His eyesight must have been extraordinarily good. There is a beautiful specimen, still preserved at Coventry, of his Greek caligraphy and Baskerville-a fine judge in such mattersborrowed this when cutting the matrices for his famous fount of Greek type. Hollands renderings are, in their own way, unique. He had, says one writer, a most admirable knack in translating books . . . several of the most obscure being translated by him, one of which was Plutarchs Morals...