of Russia,
as she herself tells us, wherewith to solace and instruct herself during
the first wretched years of her miserable married life. It is, perhaps,
not impossible to trace in some passages of her later life the results
of what she then read.
[Footnote G: _Essays._ Book I., Chapter 25.]
[Footnote H: _Essays_, II. 23.]
[Footnote I: _Ibid._ II. 10.]
[Footnote J: _Les Reveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire._ Quatrieme
Promenade.]
And thus we might go on accumulating the names of men and women whom
all the world knows, who have confessed their obligations to the old
biographer,--philosophers like Bacon, warriors like Bussy d'Amboise,
poets like Wordsworth; while many a one has owed much to him who has
made no open acknowledgment of his debt. Montaigne somewhere complains
of the unlicensed stealings from his author; and Udall, in his Preface
to the Apophthegms of Erasmus, declares,--"It is a thing scarcely
believable, how much, and how boldly as well, the common writers that
from time to time have copied out his [Plutarch's] works, as also
certain that have thought themselves liable to control and amend all
men's doings, have taken upon them in this author, who ought with
all reverence to be handled of them, and with all fear to have been
preserved from altering, depraving, or corrupting.
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