pilgrimages was given to the world. These little gems have been accepted
as classics and will live. In all there are one hundred eighty Little
Journeys that take us to the homes of the men and women who transformed
the thought of their time, changed the course of empire, and marked the
destiny of civilization. Through him, the ideas, the deeds, the
achievements of these immortals have been given to the living present and
will be sent echoing down the centuries.

Hubbard's Little Journeys to the homes of these men and women have not
been equaled since Plutarch wrote his forty-six parallel lives of the
Greeks and Romans. And these were given to the world before the first
rosy dawn of modern civilization had risen to the horizon. Without
dwelling upon their achievements, Plutarch, with a trifling incident, a
simple word or an innocent jest, showed the virtues and failings of his
subject. As a result, no other books from classical literature have come
down through the ages to us with so great an influence upon the lives of
the leading men of the world. Who can recount the innumerable biographies
that begin thus: "In his youth, our subject had for his constant reading,
Plutarch's Lives, etc."? Emerson must have had in mind this silent,
irresistible force that shaped the lives of the great men of these twenty
centuries when he declared, "All history resolves itself very easily into
the biography of a few stout and earnest persons."

Plutarch lived in the time of Saint Paul, and wrote of the early Greeks
and Romans. After two thousand years Hubbard appeared, to bridge the
centuries from Athens, in the golden age of Pericles, to America, in the
wondrous age of Edison. With the magic wand of genius he touched the
buried mummies of all time, and from each tomb gushed forth a geyser of
inspiration.