this undying
Greek!--names of the great and wise through many long centuries, men
differing in age, country, religion, language, and occupation. For ages
he has charmed youth, instructed manhood, and solaced graybeards. His
heroes have become household words throughout the world. He has been
equally familiar with court, with camp, and with cottage. He has been
the companion of the soldier, the text-book of the philosopher, and the
_vade-mecum_ of kings and statesmen. And his name even now, after the
lapse of so many generations, is fresher than ever.

Yet Lord Macaulay could not refrain from a sneer at Plutarch as a pedant
who thought himself a great philosopher and a great politician. Pedant
he may have been; philosopher and politician he may not have been; but
he was, nevertheless, the prince of biographers. Macaulay has praised
Boswell's "Life of Johnson" as the best biography ever written. But was
not Boswell a pedant? Was he a philosopher? Macaulay himself has penned
many biographies. Most of them are quite above the pedantry of
small facts. Instead, they are crammed with deep philosophy, with
abstractions, and with the balancing of antithetical qualities. They
are bloodless frameworks, without life or humanity,--bundles of
peculiarities skilfully grouped, and ticketed with such and such a name.
No one sees a man within. As biographies they will not be remembered,
but as instances of labored learning, of careful special pleading,
and of brilliant rhetoric. Elsewhere, however, he has descended from
philosophy, and not been above the pedantry of detail. And he has given
us, in consequence, charming lives,--successful, in fact, just so far as
he has followed in the footsteps of the old Greek. Yet who would for
a moment compare his Pitt, his Goldsmith, or his William IV., as
biography, with Plutarch's Alcibiades, or Cato the Censor? We remember
the fact that Goldsmith sometimes wore a peach-blossom suit, but we see
Cato in his toga.

Very many works have been written, purporting to be "The Life and Times"
of this or that man. Where a man has occupied a large historic place,
has been moulded by his times, and has moulded in turn the coming years,
such works are well enough as history. As biography they are failures.
The Times get the upper hand, and thrust down the Life. Without the
Life, such works would be better, too, as history; for man and the world
are two different things, and their respective provinces cannot,