first settlers in California, the colonization of Oregon was mainly effected under the direction of Methodist ministers and the auspices of the Methodist Church. Catholic priests, it is true, had preceded Methodism on its soil, and the present Archbishop of Portland and the Vicar-Apostolic of Vancouver had visited its Indian tribes in 1838; but the Methodist colonies, which arrived in the country a few years later, were deeply imbued with hatred to Catholicity, and a good deal of their intolerant spirit still remains among the people. The Jesuits have been, indeed, very successful in converting and civilizing the Indians; but the white population, with the exception of a few Canadian colonies and a not very large number of Catholics in the city of Portland and the mining districts of southern Oregon, is mainly under Methodist influence. Indeed, so high did anti-Catholic prejudice run among the first settlers of Oregon, that a Methodist conference seriously proposed to Mr. Lane, the first governor of the territory, to expel all Catholics from his jurisdiction by force, a proposition which it is scarcely needful to say he indignantly rejected. Of late years, however, the number of Catholics is

on the increase, and with the greater facilities for settlement offered by the lines of railroads now in course of construction, their numbers will no doubt grow still faster in the future. Portland in Oregon is an archiepiscopal see, and Washington territory is a separate diocese, so that Catholic immigrants need not fear the want of religious aids in spite of the limited number of their fellow-worshippers in these northern districts of the Pacific coast.

Such, in brief, is the past history and the present state of the church beyond the Rocky Mountains; and a Catholic can hardly fail to find in them the brightest hopes for its future. Obstacles will have to be encountered, no doubt; fights be fought and sacrifices made; but the successes which Catholicity has already achieved, and the vantage-ground she now occupies in California, leave little reason to doubt of her final triumph. The soil, fertilized by the sweat and blood of the Franciscan missionaries, cannot prove a barren one; and no part of the Union gives promise of a richer harvest than that California which a few years ago was regarded throughout the world as the chosen abode of lawlessness and crime.

THE moral influence which Plutarch exerts over posterity is of a very peculiar kind. He has not, like Aristotle, laid down the law to an entire world for nearly two thousand years. He has not been deemed so perfect a master of style as Virgil or Cicero, who were the models, first of the Benedictines, and then of the prose writers and poets of the humanitarian school. His reputation pales by the side of the brilliant fame which the resurrected Plato enjoyed during the fifteenth century; and yet he has done what all these immortals, whose authority far surpasses in extent and duration that of his biographies, have failed to do. Among the revived ancient authors none has surpassed Plutarch in inspiring the moderns with the same keen appreciation of the classic characteristics, with the same love and enthusiasm for whatever is really or supposedly great in antiquity; and none. has therefore contributed so much to the revelation of what we understand by the purely human in man's nature.

From the days of Macchiavelli and Charles V. down to the present, we rarely fail to meet with the name of Plutarch among those writers who have made an abiding impression on the youthful minds of prominent statesmen and warriors. In turning over the leaves of the biographies of our modern great, we are constantly reminded of the words which Schiller puts into the mouth of Carl Moor: "When I read of the great men in my Plutarch, I loath our ink-staining age." This sentiment has found an echo in every civilized land, and especially in France.

The first French translation of Plutarch's Parallels was welcomed by

Montaigne with expressions of the liveliest joy. "We would have been swallowed up in ignorance," exclaims he, (essay ii. 4,) "if this book had not extricated us from the slough; thanks to Plutarch, we now dare to speak and write." Rabelais refreshes his soul with the Moralia. "There is," writes the translator Amyot to King Charles IX., "no better work next to holy writ." The "perennially young" Plutarch is the "breviary," the "conscience" of the century, and he remains until the beginning of the most modern time-as Madame Roland calls him-"the pasture of great souls," and the "fellow-companion of warriors." Condé had him read out aloud in his tent, and in the historical part of the books for a camp library which Napoleon Bonaparte ordered from the citoyen J. B. Soy, "homme de lettres," March, 1798, Plutarch stands first, and Tacitus, Thucydides, and Frederick II. last.

The home of Plutarch's admirers is, as we have already observed, France. Like all Latin races, the French delight to revel in pictures of ancient greatness; their historical imagination is governed by fantastic ideals of antiquity, especially of ancient Rome, and the fountain from which they drew, mediately and immediately, their inspiration, is Plutarch's Lives. Hence the exaggerated estimate of Plutarch's historical merits, against which modern criticism begins to protest with much vigor, is greatest in that country. Indeed, the principle upon which Plutarch has selected his historical authorities, and the manner in which he has used them, are decidedly open to objection. They are not chosen according to their scientific or critical

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value, but according to their wealth of picturesque detail and psychologically remarkable characteristics. He follows a leading author, whose name he usually omits to state, and whose testimony he only compares with that of other writers when there is a conflict of authorities. The text is never cited. He reproduces the sense, but with that latitude which is natural to an imaginative mind endowed in an unusual degree with the gift of realizing the past. In the choice of his subject matter he follows the instincts of a historical portrait-painter. describe campaigns, to analyze great political changes, is not his province. His acquaintance with the political and military systems of the ancient Greeks and Romans is very superficial, and he seems to care little for a more intimate knowledge of them. His main purpose is not the study of history, but that of the personal career of interesting individuals. "It is not "It is not histories we write," Plutarch tells us himself in his introduction to the life of Alexander the Great; "but lifepictures;" and for these, he maintains, some small trait, some apt expression, be it only a witticism, is often more available than the greatest military deeds, the most bloody victories, or the most splendid conquests.

In making this distinction, which Plutarch repeatedly acknowledges to be a rule with him, he forgets that he violates the natural connection, inasmuch as all historical personages are part and parcel of the time they live in; he forgets also that, thus treated, historical characters degenerate into ordinary mortals. But Plutarch does not aspire to the dignity of a historian; he simply claims to "paint souls;" and those readers who ignore this distinction have never comprehended him.

Some of the works which Plutarch was still able to consult are lost, and we depend, therefore, upon him for

light on certain important periods of history. This has led many to regard him as a historical authority, to consider his biographical narratives as the main object of his writings, and to skip the moralizing comparisons of the parallel biographies which show that these portraits are to him nothing more than a means of illustrating his peculiar ethics by examples. This point is of great importance; for it proves the only view from which the literary character of Plutarch can be justly estimated.

Not only his narratives, but the judgments which he bases upon them, and the views of the world from which they spring, have left their mark on posterity, and this to an extent surprising even to the initiated. And here it behooves us to exercise still greater caution, a still greater distrust, than we entertain for his statements of fact. Plutarch stands as far removed from the times of the heroes upon whom he passes judgment, as we are from the characters of the Crusades. The full effects of this remoteness can only be estimated by those who have made Plutarch's age and the moral condition reflected in his non-historical writings their special study. "Plutarch's biographies," remarks a French scholar of this class, " are an explanatory appendix to his Moralia; both equally reflected a Greek provincialist's views of the world under the empire; the views of one who sought to console himself for the degradation and emptiness of the present by a romantic idealization of the real and imaginary grandeur of a former age." Plutarch is an out-and-out romancist, and to this must be mainly ascribed the influence he wields over a certain order of minds. The historical errors which we are so slowly correcting are due to this discovery. To show how little Plutarch was fit to play the part of interpreter to a period which had

already become remote antiquity in his day, we need only cast a single glance at the times in which he lived. From Plutarch's own writings we glean nothing that is authentic in regard to his life. Rich as they no doubt are in interesting contributions to the moral and intellectual history of his times, they are barren as regards every thing relating to the author's biography. In truth, the biographer of the ancients is himself without a biography. We know, in the main, that he was born in Charonea, about the time of Nero's visit to the Delphic temple; that he studied at Athens under the philosopher Ammonius; that he visited Greece, Egypt, and Italy as a peripatetic scholar. After having taught many years at Rome, he finally returned to his native place and commenced that prolific literary activity which he displayed in nearly all departments of ancient knowledge. In these labors the indefatigable student was rather assisted than retarded by his various public duties, first on the urban police, then as archon, and lastly as the high-priest of the Delphic Apollo.

The story that Plutarch was once the teacher of Trajan, and that the latter appointed him governor of Hellas and Illyricum, first told by Symkellas and Suidas, then repeated by John of Salisbury and the scholars of the Renaissance, is a silly Byzantine fable. The latter portion of Plutarch's life, as we learn from his confessions, passed in a retirement entrely inconsistent with the Byzantine story. The world within whose bounds the archon of Chæronea and priest of Apollo lived was a contracted one, and only romance could gild such an existence with the halo of departed glory.

Plutarch may be said to have done wonders. At a time when the old love of country and state had long

died out, he, the philosopher, determinedly opposed the petty, baneless cosmopolitanism of his day. In a world which had long lost its ancient faith, and in which the Gospel of Christ had not yet attained the ascendency, the priest of the Delphic oracle battled undismayed for the old gods and against the anarchy of the renegade schools of philosophy. In both cases he is, however, himself, and more than he seems aware or is willing to concede, tainted by the prevailing scep ticism, and it is this, in consequence, which colors his own views of the world with what we call romanticism.

Let us follow Plutarch for a moment on those two battle-fields of his polemics, and observe the distinctive features of the Moralia.

The warm appreciation which he displays for every thing that is great in humanity or history is surprising when we remember the incredible hollowness of the surroundings amidst which his heroes were drawn, and the society in which he lived, not as a soured misanthrope, but as a stirring official. The petty Charonea was hardly the place to prepare the mind for the reception of great thoughts. The population of the municipality, though active and bustling, lived far from the great world. It had its share of orators, sophists, lecturers; it had party divisions to quicken the heart to love and hate;" it had games to excite the passions and to stimulate ambition. But what were the questions which the people quarrelled about with all the readiness and vehemence proverbial of the Hellenic race? They were mainly where the best baths might be found; which party was most likely to triumph at the next dog or cock-fight; what kind of man the new official from Rome, or the next travelling sophist, would turn out to be; how such a one had made his fortune, or how Ismenodora,