is 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.

His biographies are numerous and short. 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. 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. Another advantage which we obtain by his
method is that we are not given a complete chronicle of each person's
life, but only of the remarkable events in it, and such incidents as
will enable us to judge of his character. This also avoids what is the
dreariest part of all modern biographies, those chapters I mean which
describe the slow decay of their hero's powers, his last illness, and
finally his death. This subject, which so many writers of our own time
seem to linger lovingly upon, is dismissed by Plutarch in a few lines,
unless any circumstance of note attended the death of the person
described.

Without denying that Plutarch is often inaccurate and often diffuse;
that his anecdotes are sometimes absurd, and his metaphysical
speculations not unfrequently ridiculous, he is nevertheless generally
admitted to be one of the most readable authors of antiquity, while all
agree that his morality is of the purest and loftiest type.

The first edition of the Greek text of Plutarch's Lives appeared at
Florence in the year 1517, and two years afterwards it was republished
by Aldus. Before this, however, about the year 1470, a magnificent Latin
version by various hands appeared at Rome. From this, from the Greek
text, and also from certain MSS. to which he had access, Amyot in the
year 1559 composed his excellent translation, of which it has been well
said: "Quoique en vieux Gaulois, elle a un air de fraicheur qui la fait
rejeunir de jour en jour."

Amyot's spirited French version was no less spiritedly translated by Sir
Thomas North. His translation was much read and admired in its day; a
modern reviewer even goes so far as to say that it is "still beyond
comparison the be