Light and shade are as necessary to a character as to a picture, but a man who devotes his energies for years to the study of any single person’s life, is insensibly led into palliating or explaining away his faults and exaggerating his excellencies until at last he represents him as an impossible monster of virtue. By this, he avoids one of the greatest faults of modern biographers, that namely of identifying himself with some one particular personage, and endeavouring to prove that all his actions were equally laudable. No one is so well able as Plutarch to dispel the doubt which all schoolboys feel as to whether the names about which they read ever belonged to men who were really alive his characters are so intensely human and lifelike in their faults and failings as well as in their virtues, that we begin to think of them as of people whom we have ourselves personally known. Other writers may be read with profit, with admiration, and with interest but few, like Plutarch, can gossip pleasantly while instructing solidly can breathe life into the dry skeleton of history, and show that the life of a Greek or Roman worthy, when rightly dealt with, can prove as entertaining as a modern novel.

The great Duke of Marlborough, it is said, confessed that his only knowledge of English history was derived from Shakespeare’s historical plays, and it would not be too much to say that a very large proportion of educated men, in our own as well as in Marlborough’s times, have owed much of their knowledge of classical antiquity to the study of Plutarch’s Lives. From the period of the revival of classical literature in Europe down to our own times, his writings have done more than those of any other single author to familiarise us with the greatest men and the greatest events of the ancient world. No apologies are needed for a new edition of so favourite an author as Plutarch.

Lives of the noble grecians and romans