But as it often happens that the best men are but little known, and
consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way;
the writer may be called in aid to spread their history farther, and to
present the amiable pictures to those who have not the happiness of
knowing the originals; and so, by communicating such valuable patterns
to the world, he may perhaps do a more extensive service to mankind than
the person whose life originally afforded the pattern.

In this light I have always regarded those biographers who have recorded
the actions of great and worthy persons of both sexes. Not to mention
those antient writers which of late days are little read, being written
in obsolete, and as they are generally thought, unintelligible
languages, such as Plutarch, Nepos, and others which I heard of in my
youth; our own language affords many of excellent use and instruction,
finely calculated to sow the seeds of virtue in youth, and very easy to
be comprehended by persons of moderate capacity. Such as the history of
John the Great, who, by his brave and heroic actions against men of
large and athletic bodies, obtained the glorious appellation of the
Giant-killer; that of an Earl of Warwick, whose Christian name was Guy;
the lives of Argalus and Parthenia; and above all, the history of those
seven worthy personages, the Champions of Christendom. In all these
delight is mixed with instruction, and the reader is almost as much
improved as entertained.

But I pass by these and many others to mention two books lately
published, which represent an admirable pattern of the amiable in either
sex. The former of these, which deals in male virtue, was written by the
great person himself, who lived the life he hath recorded, and is by
many thought to have lived such a life only in order to write it. The
other is communicated to us by an historian who borrows his lights, as