PREFACE.


No apologies are needed for a new edition of so favourite an author as
Plutarch. 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.

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. 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. 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