ent,
an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and
inclinations than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the
bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore, as portrait-painters are more
exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is
seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give
my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls
of men; and, while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be
free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by
others."[M]

[Footnote L: In Rogers's _Recollections_, Grattan is reported as
saying,--"Of all men, if I could call up one, it should be Scipio
Africanus. Hannibal was perhaps a greater captain, but not so great and
good a man. Epaminondas did not do so much. Themistocles was a rogue."
It is curious that Themistocles is the only one of these men of whom we
have a biography by Plutarch. His Lives of Scipio and Epaminondas are
lost. Hannibal did not come within the scope of his design.]

[Footnote M: _Life of Alexander_, at the beginning.]

It is his fidelity to this principle, his dealing with events and
circumstances chiefly as they illustrate character, his delineation of
the features of the souls of men, that constitutes Plutarch's highest
merit as a biographer. He is no historian; he often neglects chronology,
and disregards the sequence of events; he omits many incidents, and he
avoids the details of national and political affairs. The progress of
the advance or decline of states is not to be learned from his pages.
But if his Lives be read in chronological order, much may be inferred
from them of the moral condition and changes of the communities in which
the men flourished whose characters and actions he describes. Biography
is thus made to cast an incidental light upon history. The successes
of Alexander give evidence of the lowering of the Greek spirit, and
illustrate the immemorial weakness of Oriental tyrannies. The victories
and the defeats of Pyrrhus alike display the vigor of Republican Rome.
The character and the fate of Mark Antony show that vigor at its ebb,
and foretell the near fall of the Roman liberties. Thus in his long
series of lives of noble Grecians and Romans, the motives and principles
which lay at the foundation of the characters of the men who moulded the
fate of Greece and Rome, the reciprocal influences of their times upon
t