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Updated: May 12, 2025
In the year after his abdication he died, at the age of sixty-one, apparently strong as regards general health, but, if Plutarch's story be true, affected with a terrible cutaneous disease.
As long as I live it will remain among my books, specially treasured as having been owned and read by one of the noblest and most sorely tried of men, a hero comparable with any of Plutarch's, "The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American."
We cannot help being sorry that Shakespeare should have gone out of his way to select such a subject. It leaves a disagreeable taste in the mouth. The aristocrat is overdone. No true aristocrat would talk such rant as Coriolanus talks in Act i. Sc. I. Shakespeare omits Plutarch's account of the oppression of the plebeians, or only slightly alludes to it.
Yet nothing of the kind can be urged against the times which produced Epictetus, Dio Chrysostom and Arrian; while at Rome, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Martial, and Juvenal were reviving the memories of the Augustan age. From several passages in Plutarch's writings we gather that he studied under a master named Ammonius, at Athens.
Upon this I desired to be left about a quarter of an hour to myself, during which, reflecting how I had been provoked and the public threatened, my scruples vanished; I gave rein to all my thoughts, recollected that all the glorious ideas which have ever entered my imagination were most concerned with vast designs, and suffered my mind to be regaled with the pleasing hopes of being the head of a party, a position which I had always admired in Plutarch's "Lives."
By the time the father and daughter reached the palace it was already tolerably late, for, after Arsinoe had quitted the stage, suitable representatives of parts had been selected for three other scenes from the life of Alexander, by the light of torches, lamps and tapers; and before the assemblage broke up, Plutarch's guests were entertained with wine, fruit, syrups, sweet cakes, oyster pasties, and other delicacies.
The Scene of this Play is laid in Babylon. The author afterwards not only polished his native language, but altered the Play itself; as to the plot consult Q. Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin, Plutarch's Life of Alexander, &c. Julius Cæsar, a Tragedy.
"But no," he continued, "you are great, you are noble, you are generous; you are acting after the most approved pattern of chivalry, viscount, I should say, my dear M. Gerdy; after the fashion of Plutarch's time! So you give up my name and my fortune, and you leave me. You will shake the dust from your shoes upon the threshold of my house; and you will go out into the world.
Whether his object was merely praise, or whether he was influenced by ideas of gain, we cannot say. No doubt his lectures were not delivered gratis, and that they were well attended seems evident from Plutarch's own notices of them, and from the names which have been preserved of the eminent men who used to frequent them.
By the time Flamsteed was fifteen years old he had embarked in still more serious work, for he had read Plutarch's "Lives," Tacitus' "Roman History," and many other books of a similar description. In 1661 he became ill with some serious rheumatic affection, which obliged him to be withdrawn from school. It was then for the first time that he received the rudiments of a scientific education.
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