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
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.
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