tunity of recording your name, I am well aware was a special object of affection."
The sweet temper and the pretty ways of the child, he proceeds to say, make the privation peculiarly painful. "Yet why," he says, "should we forget the reasonings we have often addressed to others, and regard our present pain as obliterating and effacing our former joys?" Those who had been present had spoken to him in terms of admiration of the calmness and simplicity of her behavior. The funeral had been devoid of any useless and idle sumptuosity, and her own house of all display of extravagant lamentation. This was indeed no wonder to him, who knew how much her plain and unluxurious living had surprised his philosophical friends and visitors, and who well remembered her composure under the previous loss of the eldest of her children, and again, "when our beautiful Charon left us." "I recollect," he says, "that some acquaintance from abroad were coming up with me from the sea when the tidings of the child's decease were brought, and they followed with our other friends to the house; but the perfect order and tranquillity they found there made them believe, as I afterwards was informed they had related, that nothing had happened, and that the previous intelligence had been a mistake."
The Consolation (so the letter is named) closes with expressions of belief in the immortality of each human soul; in which the parents are sustained and fortified by the tradition of their ancestors, and the revelations to which they had both been admitted, conveyed in the mystic Dionysian ceremonies.
There is a phrase in the letter which might be taken to imply that, at the time of this domestic misfortune, Plutarch and Timoxena were already grandparents. The marriage of their son Autobulus is the occasion of one of the dinner parties recorded in the Symposiac Questions; and in one of the dia-
