[In the following essay, originally published in 1895, Wyndham explains that Jacques Amyot's translation of Plutarch was the source for Sir Thomas North's translation, which in turn was used by Shakespeare in his Roman plays.]

I

Plutarch was born at the little Theban town of Chæronea, somewhere about 50 a.d. The date of his birth marks no epoch in history; and the place of it, even then, was remembered only as the field of three bygone battles. The name Chæronea, cropping up in conversation at Rome, for the birthplace of a distinguished Greek lecturer, must have sounded strangely familiar in the ears of the educated Romans whom he taught, even as the name of Dreux, or of Tewkesbury, sounds strangely familiar in our own. But apart from such chance encounters, few can have been aware of its municipal existence; and this same contrast, between the importance and the renown of Plutarch's birthplace, held in the case of his country also. The Bœotian plain—once ‘the scaffold of Mars where he held his games’¹—was but a lonely sheepwalk; even as all Greece, once a Europe of several States, was but one, and perhaps the poorest, among the many provinces of the Empire. Born at such a time and in such a place, Plutarch was still a patriot, a student of politics and a scholar, and was therefore bound by every tie of sentiment and learning to the ancient memories of his native land. Sometimes he brooded over her altered fortunes. Bœotia ‘heretofore of old time resounded and rung again with Oracles’; but now all the land that from sea to sea had echoed the clash of arms and the cadence of oratory was ‘mute or altogether desolate and forlorn’: … ‘hardly able’ he goes on, ‘to make three thousand men for the wars, which are now no more in number than one city in times past, to wit: Megara, set forth and sent to the battle of Platæa.’² At Athens, though Sulla had long since cut down the woods of the Academy, there were still philosophers; and there were merchants again at Corinth, rebuilded by Julius Cæsar. But Athens, even, and a century before, could furnish only three ships for the succour of Pompey; while elsewhere, the cities of Greece had dwindled to villages, and the villages had vanished. ‘The stately and sumptuous buildings which Pericles made to be built in the cittie of Athens’ were still standing after four hundred years, untouched by Time, but they were the sole remaining evidence of dignity. So that Plutarch, when he set himself to write to Greek worthies, found his material selected to his hand. Greek rhetoricians, himself among them, might lecture in every city of the South; but of Greek soldiers and statesmen there was not one in a land left empty and silent, save for the statues of gods and the renown of great men. The cradle of war and statecraft was become a memory dear to him, and ever evoked by his personal contact with the triumphs of Rome. From this contrast flowed his inspiration for the Parallel Lives: his desire, as a man, to draw the noble Grecians, long since dead, a little nearer to the noonday of the living; his delight, as an artist, in setting the noble Romans whose names were in every mouth, a little further into the twilight of a more ancient romance. By placing them side by side, he gave back to the Greeks that touch which they had lost with the living in the death of Greece, and to the Romans that distinction from everyday life which they were fast beginning to lose. Then and ever since, an imaginative effort was needed to restore to Greece those trivialities of daily life which, in other countries, an imaginative effort is needed to destroy; and hence her hold on the imagination of every age. Plutarch, considering his country, found her a solitude. Yet for him the desert air was vibrant with a rumour of the mighty dead. Their memories loomed heroic and tremendous through the dimness of the past; and he carried them with him when he went to Rome, partly on a political errand, and partly to deliver Greek lectures.

In Juvenal's ‘Greek city’ he needed, and indeed he had, small Latin. ‘I had no leisure to study and exercise the Latin tongue, as well for the great business I had then to do, as also to satisfy them that came to learn philosophy of me’: thus, looking back from Chæronea, does he write in his preface to the Demosthenes and Cicero, adding that he ‘understood not matters so much by words, as he came to understand words by common experience and knowledge he had in things.’ We gather that he wrote many, if not all, of the Lives at his birthplace, the ‘poor little town’ to which he returned: ‘remaining there willingly lest it should become less.’ But it was in Flavian Rome, in the ‘great and famous city thoroughly inhabited’ and containing ‘plenty of all sort of books,’ that, ‘having taken upon him to write a history into which he must thrust many strange things unknown to his country,’ he gathered his materials ‘out of divers books and authorities,’ or picked them up, as a part of ‘common experience and knowledge,’ in familiar converse with the cultured of his day. I have quoted thus, for the light the passage throws on the nature of his researches in Rome, although the word ‘history’ may mislead. For his purpose was not to write histories, even of individuals. He tells us so himself. ‘I will only desire the reader,’ he writes in his preface to the Alexander and Cæsar, ‘not to blame me though I do not declare all things at large … for they must remember that my intent is not to write histories but only lives. For the noblest deeds,’ he goes on, ‘do not always shew man's virtues and vices, but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport makes men's natural dispositions and manners appear more plainly than the famous battles won, wherein are slain ten thousand men.’ ‘As painters do take the resemblance of the face and favour of the countenance,’ making ‘no accompt of other parts of the body,’ so he, too, asks for ‘leave to seek out the signs and tokens of the mind only.’ That was his ambition: to paint a gallery of portraits; to focus his vision on the spiritual face of his every subject, and for every Greek to hang a Roman at his side. To compass it he set himself deliberately, as an artist, unconscious of any intention other than the choice of good subjects and, his choice once made, the rejection from each of all but the particular and the significant. He stood before men's souls to study ‘the singularity each possessed,’³ as Velasquez in a later age before men's bodies; and, even as his method was allied, so was his measure of accomplishment not less.

But the Parallel Lives shows something different from this purpose, is something more than a gallery of portraits hung in pairs. Plutarch stands by his profession. His immediate concern is with neither history nor politics, but with the ‘disposition and manners’ of the great. He chooses his man, and then he paints his picture, with a master's choice of the essential. And yet, inasmuch as he chooses every subject as a matter of course on political grounds—as he sees all men in the State—it follows that his gallery is found, for all his avowed intention, to consist of political portraits alone. Thirteen, indeed, of his sitters belong not only to history but also to one chapter of history—a chapter short, dramatic, bloody, and distinctly political. This was the chance. When Plutarch, the lecturer, dropped into Roman society fresh from the contemplation of Greece ‘depopulate and dispeopled,’ he found its members spending their ample leisure in academic debate. After more than a hundred years they were still discussing the protagonists in that greatest of political dramas which, ‘for a sumptuous conclusion to a stately tragedy,’ had ushered in the empire of the world. Predisposed by contrast of origin and affinity of taste, he threw himself keenly into their pastime, and he gives, by the way, some minute references to points at issue. For instance, when Pompey and the Senate had deserted Italy at Cæsar's approach, a stern-chase of ships and swords had swept round three continents, and thereon had followed a campaign of words and pens at Rome. In that campaign the chief attack and reply had been Cicero's Cato and Cæsar's Anticaton; and these, he tells us,⁴ had ‘favourers unto his day, some defending the one for the love they bare Cæsar, and others allowing the other for Cato's sake.’ We gather that he and his Roman friends argued of these matters over the dinner-table and in the lecture-halls, even as men argue to-day of the actors in the French Revolution. Now, to glance at the ‘Table of the Noble Grecians and Romanes’ is to see how profoundly this atmosphere affected his selection of Roman lives. For, excluding the legendary founders and defenders, with the Emperors Galba and Otho (whose lives are interpolations from elsewhere), we find that thirteen of the nineteen left were party chiefs in the constitutional struggles which ended on the fields of Pharsalia and Philippi. The effect on the general cast of the Lives has been so momentous that a whole quarter covers only the political action which these thirteen politicians crowded into less than one hundred years. The society of idlers, which received Plutarch at Rome, was still debating the ideals for which these thirteen men had fought and died; it was therefore inevitable that, in seeking for foreign parallels, he should have found almost as many as he needed among the actors in that single drama. As it was, he chose for his greater portraitures all the chief actors, and a whole army of subsidiary characters for his groups in the middle distance: as Saturninus and Cinna from one act, Clodius and Curio from another. Nothing is wanting. You have the prologue of the Gracchi, the epilogue of Antony, and between the play from the triumph of Marius to Brutus in his despair: ‘looking up to the firmament that was full of stars,’ and ‘sighing’ over a cause lost for ever. And yet it remains true that Plutarch did not make this selection from—or rather this clean sweep of—the politicians of a certain epoch in order to illustrate that epoch's history, still less to criticise any theory of constitutional government. The remaining Romans, howbeit engaged in several issues, and the Greeks, though gathered from many ages and many cities, are all politicians, or, being orators and captains, are still in the same way chosen each for his influence on the fortunes of a State. But they were not consciously chosen to illustrate history or to discuss politics. Thanks, not to a point of view peculiar to Plutarch but to an instinct pervading the world in which he lived, to a prepossession then so universal that he is never conscious of its influence on his aim, they are all public men. For himself, he was painting individual character; and he sought it among men bearing a personal stamp. But he never sought it in a private person or a comedian; nor even in a poet or a master of the Fine Arts. To look for distinction in such a quarter never occurred to him; could never, I may say, have entered his head. He cannot conceive that any young ‘gentleman nobly born’ should so much as wish to be Phidias or Polycletus or Anacreon;⁵ and this from no vulgar contempt for the making of beautiful things, nor any mean reverence for noble birth, but because, over and above the making of beautiful things, there are deeds that are better worth the doing, and because men of noble birth are freer than others to choose what deeds they will set themselves to do. Why, then, he seems to ask, should they seek any service less noble than the service of their countrymen? why pursue any ambition less exalted than the salvation of their State? For his part, he will prefer Lycurgus before Plato; for, while the one ‘stablished and left behind him’ a constitution, the other left behind him only ‘words and written books.’⁶ His preference seems a strange one now; but it deserves to be noted the more nearly for its strangeness. At any rate, it was the preference of a patriot and a republican, whose country had sunk to a simple province under an alien emperor, and it governed the whole range of Plutarch's choice.

This result has been rendered the more conspicuous by another cause, springing at first from an accident, but in its application influenced by the political quality of Plutarch's material. Lost sight of and scattered in the Dark Ages, the Parallel Lives were recovered and rearranged at the revival of learning. But just as a gallery of historical portraits, being dispersed and re-collected, will in all probability be hung after some chronological scheme, so have the lives been shuffled anew under the influence of their political extraction, in such a sort as to change not only the complexion but also the structure of Plutarch's design. They form no longer a gallery of political portraits, hung in pairs for contrast's sake: they are grouped with intelligible reference to the history of Athens and of Rome. We know from Plutarch's own statements that he had no hand in their present arrangement. He was engrossed in depicting the characters of great men, and he wrote and dedicated each pair of lives to Socius Senecio, or another, as an independent ‘book,’ ‘treaty,’ or ‘volume.’ It is clear from many passages that he gathered these ‘volumes’ together without reference to their political bearing on each other. The Pericles and Fabius Maximus, which is now the Fifth ‘book,’ was originally the Tenth; and the change has apparently been made to bring Pericles, so far as the Greeks are concerned, within the consecutive history of Athens: just as the Demosthenes and Cicero, once the Fifth, is now by much removed so that Cicero may fall into place among the actors of the Roman drama. So, too, the Theseus, now standing First, as the founder of Athens, was written after the Demosthenes, now set well-nigh at the end of the series. And on the same grounds, evidently, to the Marius and the Pompey, written respectively after the Cæsar and the Brutus, there have been given such positions as were dictated by the development of the drama. The fact is, Plutarch's materials, being all political, have settled of themselves, and have been sorted in accordance with their political nature: until his work, pieced together by humanists and rearranged by translators, bears within it some such traces of a new symmetry, imperfect yet complex, as we detect in the stratification of crystalline rocks. Little has been added in North's first edition to the substance of Plutarch's book;⁷ but its structure and, as I hope to show, some of its colour and surface are the product, not only of the one mind which created it, but of the many who have preserved it, and of the ages it has outworn. The mere changes in the order of the ‘books’ have neither increased nor diminished their contents; but by evolving, as they do, a more or less symmetrical juxtaposition of certain elements, they have discovered the extent to which the work is permeated by those elements. As the quartz dispersed through a rock strikes the eye, when it is crystallised, from the angles of its spar; so the amount of Plutarch's political teaching, which might have escaped notice when it was scattered through independent books, now flashes out from the grouping together of the Athenians who made and unmade Athens, and of the Romans who fought for and against the Republican Constitution of Rome. For the Parallel Lives are now disposed in a rough chronological order; in so far, at least, as this has been possible where the members of each pair belong severally to nations whose histories mingle for the first time, when the activity of the one ceases and the activity of the other begins. In earlier days they had but dim intimations of each other's fortunes: as when, in the Camillus, ‘the rumour ran to Greece incontinently that Rome was taken’; and it is only in the Philopœmen and Flaminius that their fates are trained into a single channel. So that, rather, there are balance and opposition between the two halves of the whole: the latter portion being governed by the grouping in dramatic sequence of the thirteen Romans who took part in the constitutional drama of Rome; whereas the earlier is as it were polarised about the history of Athens. Considering the governing lives in each case, and disregarding their accidental companions, you will find that in both the whole pageant is displayed. There are excursions, but in the latter half we live at Rome; in the earlier we are taken to Athens: there to be spectators of her rise, her glory, and her fall. We listen to the prologue in the Solon; and in the Themistocles, the Pericles, the Alcibiades, we contemplate the three acts of the tragedy. The tragedy of Athens, the drama of Rome: these are the historic poles of the Parallel Lives; while, about half-way between, in the book of Philopœmen and Flaminius, is the historic hinge, at the fusion of Greek with Roman story. For Philopœmen and Flaminius were contemporaries: the one a Greek whom ‘Greece did love passingly well as the last valiant man she brought forth in her age’; the other, a Roman whom she loved also, Plutarch tells us, because, in founding the suzerainty of Rome, he founded it on the broad stone of honour. In this book the balance of sustained interest shifts, and after it the Lives are governed to the end by the development of the single Roman drama. We may say to the end: since Plutarch may truly be said to end with the suicide of Brutus. The Aratus, though of vivid and, with the Sylla, of unique interest—for both are based on autobiographies⁸—belongs, it is thought, to another book.⁹ This, I have already said, is true of the Galba and the Otho, dissevered as they are by the obvious division of a continuous narrative; and of the Artaxerxes, which, of course, has nothing to do among the Greek and Roman lives; while the Hannibal and Scipio (major), included by North, is not even Plutarch. These lives, then, were added, no doubt, to complete the defect of those that had been lost; as, for instance, the Metellus promised by Plutarch in his Marius, and the book of Epaminondas and Scipio (minor), which we know him to have written, on the authority of his son.

If, then, ignoring these accretions, we study the physiognomy of the Parallel Lives as revealed in the Table, the national tragedy of Athens and the constitutional drama of Rome are seen to stand out in consecutive presentment from its earlier and latter portions. Each is at once apparent, because each has been reconstituted for us. But the fact that such reconstitution has been possible—proving, as it does, how complete was the unsuspected influence of Plutarch's political temperament over his conscious selection of great men—puts us in the way of tracing this influence over his every preference. It gives a key to one great chamber in his mind, and a clue which we can follow through the windings of his book. It makes plain the fact that every one of his heroes achieved, or attempted, one of four political services which a man may render to his fellows. Their life-work consisted (1) in founding States; (2) in defending them from foreign invasion; (3) in extending their dominion; or (4) in leading political parties within their confines. All are, therefore, men who made history, considered each one in relation to his State. In dealing, for instance, with Demosthenes and Cicero, Plutarch ‘will not confer their works and writings of eloquence,’ but ‘their acts and deeds in the government of the commonwealth.’ In this manner, also, does he deal even with his ‘founders,’ who can scarce be called men, being but figures of legend and dream. Yet they too were evolved under the spell of political prepossession in the nations which conceived their legends; and the floating, shifting appearances, the ‘mist and hum’ of them, are compacted by a writer in whom that prepossession was strongly present. That such airy creatures should figure at all as historical statesmen, having something of natural movement and bulk, in itself attests beyond all else to this habit of Plutarch's mind. Having ‘set forth the lives of Lycurgus (which established the law of the Lacedaemonians), and of King Numa Pompilius,’ he thought he ‘might go a little further to the life of Romulus,’ and ‘resolved to match him which did set up the noble and famous city of Athens, with him which founded the glorious and invincible city of Rome.’ He is dealing, as he says, with matter ‘full of suspicion and doubt, being delivered us by poets and tragedy makers, sometimes without truth and likelihood, and always without certainty.’ He is dealing, indeed, with shadows; but they are shadows projected backward upon the mists about their origin by two nations which were above all things political; and he lends them a further semblance of consistency and perspective, by regarding them from a political point of view in the light of a later political experience. His Theseus and his Romulus are, indeed, a tissue woven out of folk-lore and the faint memories of a savage prime: you shall find in them traces of forgotten customs; marriage by capture,¹⁰ for instance, and much else that is frankly beyond belief; things which, he says, ‘peradventure will please the reader better for their strangeness and curiosity, than offend or mislike him for their falsehood.’ But his Lycurgus, saving the political glosses, and his Pompilius are likewise all of legend and romance: of the days ‘when the Aventine was not inhabited, nor enclosed within the walls of Rome, but was full of springs and shadowed groves,’ the haunt of Picus and Faunus, and of ‘Lady Silence’; yet he contrives to cast a political reflection over even this noiseless dreamland of folk-lore. Lycurgus and Theseus, in the manner of their deaths, present vague images of the fate which in truth befell the most of their historic parallels. Lycurgus kills himself, not because his constitution for Sparta is in danger, but lest any should seek to change it; and the bones of Theseus, the Athenian, murdered by his ungrateful countrymen, are magically discovered, and are brought back to Athens ‘with great joye, with processions and goodly sacrifices, as if Theseus himself had been alive, and had returned into the city again.’ As we read, we seem to be dreaming of Cato's death at Utica; and of Alcibiades' return, when the people who had banished him to the ruin of their country ‘clustred all to him only and … put garlands of flowers upon his head.’

The relation of the Lives in the three other categories to the political temper of Plutarch and his age is more obvious, if less significant of that temper and its prevalence in every region of thought. Of the Romans, Publicola and Coriolanus belong also to romance. But both were captains in the first legendary wars waged by Rome for supremacy in Italy; and the lives of both are charged with the hues of party politics. Publicola is painted as the aristocrat who, by patient loyalty to the Constitution, lives down the suspicions of the populace; Coriolanus, as a type of caste at once noble for its courage and lamentable for its indomitable pride. Passing, after these four, out of fable into history, there remain six Romans besides the thirteen involved in the culminating drama. Three of these, Furius Camillus, Marcellus, and Quintus Fabius Maximus, were the heroes of Rome's successful resistance to foreign invasion, and two, T. Q. Flaminius and Paulus Æmilius, the heroes of her equally successful foreign and colonial policy; while one only, Marcus Cato, is chosen as a constitutional politician from the few untroubled years between the assurance of empire abroad and the constitutional collapse at home. Turning from Italy to Greece, we find, again, that after the two legendary founders and Solon, the more or less historical contriver of the Athenian constitution, the remainder Greeks without exception fall under one or more of the three other categories: they beat back invasion, or they sought to extend a suzerainty, or they led political parties in pursuit of political ideals. Swayed by his political temperament, Plutarch exhibits men of a like stamp engaged in like issues. But, in passing from his public men of Italy to his public men of Greece, we may note that, while the issues which call forth the political energies of the two nations are the same, a difference merely in the order of event works up the same characters and the same situations into another play with another and a more complicated plot. Rome had practically secured the headship of the Italian States some years before the First Punic War. Her suzerainty was, therefore, an accomplished fact, frequently challenged but never defeated, before the Italian races were called upon to face any foe capable of absorbing their country. But in Greece, neither before nor after the Persian invasion did any one State ever become permanently supreme. So that, whereas, in Italy, the issue of internal wars and jealousies was decided long before the danger of foreign domination had to be met; in Greece, overshadowed in turn by the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman, that issue was never decided at all. It follows that the history of Italy is the history of Rome, and not of the Latins or of the Samnites; but that the history of Greece is, at first, the history of Athens, of Sparta, and of Thebes in rivalry with one another, and, at last, of Macedon and Rome brooding over leagues and confederacies between the lesser islands and States. The Roman drama is single. The City State becomes supreme in Italy; rolls back wave after wave of Gauls and Carthaginians and Teutons; extends her dominion to the ends of the earth; and then, suddenly, finds her Constitution shattered by the strain of world-wide empire. Plutarch gives the actors in all these scenes; but it is in the last, which is the most essentially political, that he crowds his stage with the living, and, afterwards, cumbers it with the dead. The Greek drama is complex, and affords no such opportunity for scenic concentration. Even the first and simplest issue, of repelling an invader, is made intricate at every step by the jealousy between Sparta and Athens. Plutarch tells twice over¹¹ that Themistocles, the Athenian, who had led the allies to victory at Salamis, proposed to burn their fleets at anchor so soon as the danger was overpassed: for by this means Athens might seize the supremacy of the sea. The story need not be true: that it should ever have been conceived proves in what spirit the Greek States went into alliance, even in face of Persia. The lives of two other Athenians, Cimon and Aristides, complete Plutarch's picture of the Persian War; and after that war he can never group his Greeks on any single stage. Each of them seeks, indeed, to extend the influence of his State, or to further his political opinions; but in the tangle of combinations resulting from their efforts one feature remains unchanged among many changes. Through all the fighting and the scheming it is ever Greek against Greek. The history is a kaleidoscope, but the pieces are the same. That is the tragedy of Greece: the ceaseless duel of the few with the many, with a complication of racial rivalries between independent City States. There is no climax of development, there is no sudden failure of the heart; but an agony of spasm twitches at every nerve in the body in turn. Extinction follows extinction of political power in one State after, and at the hands of, another; and in the end there is a total eclipse of national life under the shadow of Rome.

It is customary to date the political death of Greece from the battle at Chæronea, in which the Macedonians overthrew the allied armies of Athens and Thebes. But to Plutarch, who had a better, because a nearer, point of view, the perennial virulence of race and opinion, which constituted so much of the political life of Greece, went after Chæronea as merrily as before. The combatants, whose sky was but clouded by the empire of Alexander, fought on into the night of Roman rule; and, when they relented, it was even then, according to Plutarch, only from sheer exhaustion. Explaining the lull in these rivalries during the old age of Philopœmen, he writes that ‘like as the force and strength of sickness declineth, as the natural strength of the sickly body impaireth, envy of quarrel and war surceased as their power diminished.’ Of these Greeks, other than the founders and the heroes of the Persian War, six were leaders in the rivalry, first, between Athens and Sparta and, then, between Sparta and Thebes. Of these, three were Athenians—Pericles, Nicias, and Alcibiades; two were Spartans—Lysander and Agesilaus; one was Pelopidas the Theban. These six lives complete Plutarch's picture of the Peloponnesian War. Then, still keeping to Greeks proper, he indulges in an excursion to Syracuse in the lives of Dion and Timoleon. Later, in the lives of Demosthenes and Phocion, you feel the cloud of the Macedonian Empire gathering over Greece. And, lastly, while Rome and Macedon fight over her head for the substance of dominion and political reform, two kings of Sparta, Agis and Cleomenes, and two generals of the Achæan League, Aratus and Philopœmen, are found still thwarting each other for the shadow. Plutarch shows four others, not properly to be called Greeks: the Macedonians, Alexander and Demetrius, Pyrrhus the Molossian, and Eumenes, born a Greek of Cardia, but a Macedonian by his career. These four come on the stage as an interlude between the rivalries of the Peloponnesian War and the last futilities of the Achæan League. Alexander for a time obliterates all lesser lights; and in the lives of the other three we watch the flashing train of his successors. All are shining figures, all are crowned, all are the greatest adventurers of the world; and tumbling out of one kingdom into another, they do battle in glorious mellays for cities and diadems and Queens.

Taking a clue from the late reconstitution of the most moving scenes at Athens and Rome, I follow it through the Parallel Lives, and I sketch the political framework it discovers. Into that framework, which co-extends with Plutarch's original conception, I can fit every life in North's first edition, from the Theseus to the Aratus. I could not overlook so palpable and so significant a result of Plutarch's political temperament; and I must note it because it has been overlooked, and even obscured, in later editions of Amyot and North. Amyot's first and second editions, of 1559 and 1565, both end with the Otho, which, although it does not belong to the Parallel Lives, was at least Plutarch. But to Amyot's third, of 1567, there were added the Annibal and the Scipion (major), first fabricated for the Latin translation of 1470 by Donato Acciaiuoli and translated into French by Charles de l'Escluse, or de la Sluce, as North prefers to call him. These two lives North received into his first edition: together with a comparison by Simon Goulard Senlisien, an industrious gentleman who, as ‘S. G. S.,’ supplied him with further material at a later date.¹² For indeed, once begun in the first Latin translation, this process of completing Plutarch knew no bounds for more than two hundred years. The Spanish historian, Antonio de Guevara, had perpetrated a decade of emperors, Trajan, Hadrian, and eight more, and these, too, were translated into French by Antoine Allègre, and duly appended to the Amyot of 1567 by its publisher Vascosan. All was fish that came to Vascosan's net. The indefatigable S. G. S. concocted lives of Augustus and Seneca; translated biographies from Cornelius Nepos; and, with an excellent turn for symmetry, supplied unaided all the Comparisons which are not to be found in Plutarch. The Chæronean either wrote them, and they were lost; or, possibly, he paused before the scaling of Cæsar and Alexander, content with the perfection he had achieved. But S. G. S. knew no such embarrassment; and Amyot's publisher of 1583 accepted his contributions, as before, in the lump. North in his third edition of 1603 is a little, but only a little, more fastidious: he rejects all the Comparisons except, oddly enough, that between Cæsar and Alexander; but on the other hand, he accepts from S. G. S. the lives of ‘worthy chieftains’ and ‘famous philosophers’¹³ who—and this is a point—were not, as all Plutarch's exemplars were before everything, public men. Later, the international compliment was returned. The Abbé Bellenger translated into French eight lives—of Æneas, Tullus Hostilius, and so forth—concocted in English by Thomas Rowe; and these in their turn were duly added, first to Dacier's Plutarch in 1734, and afterwards to the Amyot of 1783: an edition you are not surprised to see filling a small bookcase. Celebrities of all sorts were recruited, simply for their fame, from every age, and from every field of performance—Plato, Aristotle, Philip, even Charlemagne!¹⁴ And the process of obscuring Plutarch's method did not end with the interjection of spurious stuff. Men cut down the genuine Lives to convenient lengths, for summaries and ‘treasuries.’ The undefeated S. G. S. covered the margin of one edition after another with reflections tending to edification. He and his kind epitomised Plutarch's matter and pointed his moral, grinding them to the dust of a classical dictionary and the ashes of a copybook headline. All these editions and epitomes and maxims, being none of Plutarch's, should not, of course, in reason have darkened his restriction on the choice of great men. Yet by their number and their vogue, they have so darkened it; and the more easily, for that Plutarch, as I have shown, says nothing of the limit he observed. Beneath these additions the political framework of the Lives lay buried for centuries; and even after they had been discarded by later translators, it was still shrouded in the mist they had exhaled. Banish the additions and their atmosphere—fit only for puritans and pedants—and once more the political framework emerges in all its significance and in all its breadth.

From this effect we cannot choose but turn to the causa causans—the mind that achieved it. We want to know the political philosophy of a writer who, being a student of human character, yet held it unworthy his study save in public men. And the curiosity will, as I think, be sharpened rather than rebated by the reflection that many of his commentators have, none the less, denied him any political insight at all.¹⁵ Their paradox plucks us by the sleeve. From a soil thus impregnated with the salt of political instinct one would have looked in the harvest for some savour of political truth; yet one is told that the Lives, fruitful of all besides, are barren of this. For my part, I must believe that Plutarch's commentators have been led to a false conclusion along one of two paths: either they have listened too innocently to his avowed intention of portraying only character, and have been confirmed in their error by the indiscriminate additions to his work; or, perceiving his exclusive choice of politicians, they have still declined to recognise political wisdom in an unexpected shape. In a work which is constituted, albeit without intention, upon lines thus definitely political, one might have looked for many direct pronouncements of political opinion. Yet in that expectation one is deceived—as I think, happily. For Plutarch's methods, at least in respect of politics and war, are not those of analysis or of argument, but of pageant and of drama, with actors living and moving against a background of processions that move and live. With all the world for his stage, he shakes off the habit of the lecture-hall, and it is only now and again that, stepping before the curtain, he will speak a prologue in a preface, or turn chorus to comment a space upon the play. Mostly he is absorbed in presenting his heroes as they fought and as they fell; in unfolding, in scene after scene, his theatrum of stirring life and majestical death. I cannot deny his many digressions on matters religious, moral, philosophical, and social; and it may be that their very number, accentuating the paucity of his political pronouncements, has emphasised the view with which I cannot concur. Doubtless they are there; nor can I believe that any would wish them away. It is interesting to hear the Pythagorean view of the solar system;¹⁶ and it is charming to be told the gossip about Aspasia¹⁷ and Dionysius¹⁸ after his fall. In the Pericles, for instance, Plutarch pauses at the first mention of Aspasia's name: ‘thinking it no great digression of our storie,’ to tell you ‘by the way what manner of woman she was.’ So he tells you what manner, and, after the telling, excuses himself once more; since, as he says, it came ‘in my minde: and me thought I should have dealt hardly, if I should have left it unwritten.’ Who will resent such compassion? Who so immersed in affairs as to die in willing ignorance of the broken man who seemed to be a ‘starke nideotte,’ with a turn for low life and repartee? Plutarch carries all before him when he says: ‘methinks these things I have intermingled concerning Dionysius, are not impertinent to the description of our Lives, neither are they troublesome nor unprofitable to the hearers, unless they have other hasty business to let or trouble them.’ He is irresistible in this vein, which, by its lightness, leads one to believe that some of the lives, like some modern essays, were first delivered before popular audiences, and then collected with others conceived in a graver key. There are many such digressions. But, just because his heroes are all politicians, of long political pronouncements there are few: even as of comments on the art of war you shall find scarce one, for the reason that strategy and tactics are made plain on a hundred fields. His politicians and captains speak and fight for themselves. It is for his readers, if they choose, to gather political wisdom from (say) his lives of the aforesaid thirteen Romans; even, as, an they will, they may deduce from the Themistocles or the Pompey the completeness of his grasp upon the latest theories on the command of the sea.

Yet there are exceptions, though rare ones, to his rule; and in questioning the political bent of his mind we are not left to inference alone. In the Lycurgus, for instance, where the actor is but a walking shadow, Plutarch must needs deal with the system associated with Lycurgus's name: so in this life we have the theory of politics which Plutarch favoured, whereas in the Pericles we have the practice of a consummate politician. From the Lycurgus, then, we are able to gauge the personal equation (so to say) of the mind which, in the Pericles, must have coloured that mind's presentment of political action and debate. Plutarch, like Plato before him, is a frank admirer of the laws which Lycurgus is said to have framed. He delights in that ‘perfectest manner of a commonwealth,’ which made the city of Lycurgus ‘the chiefest of the world, in glory and honour of government, by the space of five hundred years.’ He tells of the lawgiver's journey from Crete to Asia, to compare the ‘policy of those of Crete (being then very straight and severe) with the superfluities and vanities of Ionia’; and you may gather from the context that the one appears to the historian ‘whole and healthful,’ the others ‘sick and diseased.’ He seems also to approve Lycurgus's indiscriminate contempt for all ‘superfluous and unprofitable sciences’; for the devices of ‘licorous cooks to cram themselves in corners,’ of ‘rhetoricians who teach eloquence and the cunning cast of lying,’ of goldsmiths and fortune-tellers and panders. Again, it is with satisfaction that he paints his picture of Lycurgus returning ‘home one day out of the fields … laughing’ as he ‘saw the number of sheaves in shocks together and no one shock bigger than another’; all Laconia being ‘as it were an inheritance of many brethren, who had newly made partition together.’ But if Plutarch approves the suppression of luxury and the equal distribution of wealth as ideals, he does not approve the equal distribution of power. He is in favour of constitutional republics and opposed to hereditary monarchies; though he will tolerate even these in countries where they already exist.¹⁹ But he is for republics and against monarchies only that the man ‘born to rule’ may have authority: such a man, for instance, as Lycurgus, ‘born to rule, to command, and to give orders, as having in him a certain natural grace and power to draw men willingly to obey him.’ In any State, he postulates, on the one hand, an enduring Constitution and a strong Senate of proved men; on the other, a populace with equal political rights of electing to the Senate and of sanctioning the laws that Senate may propose. Yet these in themselves are but preliminary conditions of liberty and order. Besides, for the preservation of a State there are needed rulers few and fit, armed with enough authority and having courage enough to wield it. It is essential that the few, who are fit, shall direct and govern the many, who are not. If authority be impaired, whether by incompetence in the few or through jealousy in the many, then must disaster follow. Now, many who hold this view are prone, when disaster does follow, to blame the folly of the many rather than the unfitness of the few. But Plutarch is distinguished in this: that, holding the view as firmly as any have held it—now preaching the gospel of authority and now exhibiting its proof at every turn—he yet imputes the blame of failure, almost always, to incompetence or to cowardice in the few. ‘He that directeth well must needs be well obeyed. For like as the art of a good rider is to make his horse gentle and ready at commandment, even so the chiefest point belonging to a prince is to teach his people to obey.’ I take these words from the Lycurgus. They set forth Plutarch's chief political doctrine; and the statement of fact is pointed with his favourite image. That the horse (or the many) should play the antic at will, is to him plainly absurd: the horse must be ridden, and the many must be directed and controlled. Yet, if the riding, or the governing, prove a failure, Plutarch's quarrel is with the ruler and the horseman, not with the people or the mount. For he knows well that ‘a ragged colt oftimes proves a good horse, specially if he be well ridden and broken as he should be.’²⁰ This is but one of his innumerable allusions to horse-breaking and hunting: as, for instance, in the Paulus Æmilius, he includes ‘riders of horses and hunts of Greece’ among painters and gravers of images, grammarians, and rhetoricians, as the proper Greek tutors for completing the education of a Roman moving with the times. And no one who takes note of these allusions can doubt that, as one of a chivalrous and sporting race, he was qualified to deal with images drawn from the manège and the chase. As little can any one who follows his political drama miss the application of these images. Sometimes, indeed, his constant theme and his favourite image almost seem fused: as when he describes the natural grace of his Cæsar, ‘so excellent a rider of horse from his youth, that holding his hands behind him, he would galop his horse upon the spur’; a governor so ever at one with those he governed, that he directed even his charger by an inflexion of his will rather than of his body. This need of authority and the obligation on the few to maintain it—by a ‘natural grace,’ springing, on the one hand, from courage combined with forbearance; and leading, on the other, to harmony between the rulers and the ruled—is the text which, given out in the Lycurgus, is illustrated throughout the Parallel Lives.

I have said that, apart from the Lycurgus, Plutarch's political pronouncements are to be found mostly in the prefaces to certain ‘books’ and in scattered comments on such action as he displays. And of all these ‘books’ the Pericles and Fabius Maximus is, perhaps, the richest in pronouncements, in both its preface and its body, all bearing on his theory of authority and on its maintenance by ‘natural grace.’ A ‘harmony’ is to be aimed at; but a harmony in the Dorian mode. Pericles is commended because in later life ‘he was wont … not so easily to grant to all the people's wills and desires, no more than as it were to contrary winds.’ In Plutarch's eyes he did well when ‘he altered his over-gentle and popular manner of government … as too delicate and effeminate an harmony of music, and did convert it into an imperious government, or rather a kingly authority.’ He has nothing but praise for the independence and fortitude by which Pericles achieved Cæsar's policy of uniting within himself all the yearly offices of the State, ‘not for a little while, nor in a gear (fashion) of favour,’ but for ‘forty years together.’ He compares him to the captain of a ship ‘not hearkening to the passengers' fearful cries and pitiful tears,’ and holds him up for an example, since he ‘neither would be persuaded by his friends' earnest requests and entreaties, neither cared for his enemies' threats and accusations against him, nor yet reckoned of all their foolish scoffing songs they sung of him in the city.’ So, too, in the same book, when Plutarch comes to portray Fabius Maximus, he gives us that great man's view: that ‘to be afeared of the wagging of every straw, or to regard every common prating, is not the part of a worthy man of charge, but rather of a base-minded person, to seek to please those whom he ought to command and govern, because they are but fools.’ (Thus does blunt Sir Thomas render Amyot's polite, but equally sound, ‘parce qu'ils ne sont pas sages.’) But the independence and the endurance necessary in a ruler are not to be accompanied by irritation or contempt. While ‘to flatter the common people’ is at best effeminate,’ and at worst ‘the broad high-way of them that practise tyranny,’²¹ still, ‘he is less to be blamed that seeketh to please and gratify his common people than he that despiseth and disdaineth them’; for here is no harmony at all, but discord. The words last quoted are from the Comparison between Alcibiades and Coriolanus, two heroes out of tune with their countrymen, whose courage and independence were made thereby of no avail. But in the Pericles and Fabius Maximus Plutarch shows us heroes after his own heart, and in his preface to their lives he insists more explicitly than elsewhere on the need of not only courage and independence but also forbearance and goodwill; since without these, their complements, the other virtues, are sterile. Pericles and Fabius, being at least as proud and brave as Alcibiades and Coriolanus, ‘for that they would patiently bear the follies of their people and companions that were in charge of government with them, were marvellous profitable members for their country.’ He returns to this theory of harmony in his preface to the Phocion and Cato. In every instance he assumes as beyond dispute, that the few must govern, working an obedience in the many; but they are to work it by a ‘natural grace’ of adaptation to the needs and natures they command. In this very book he blames Cato of Utica, not for the ‘ancient simplicity’ of his manner, which ‘was indeed praiseworthy,’ but, simply because it was ‘not the convenientest, nor the fittest’ for him; for that ‘it answered nor respected not the use and manners of his time.’

How comes it to pass that Plutarch's heroes, being thus prone to compromise, yet fight and die, often at their own hands, for the ideals they uphold? The question is a fair one, and the answer reveals a profound difference between the theory and the practice of politics approved by the ancient world and the theory and the practice of politics approved in the England of to-day. ‘The good and ill,’ says Plutarch, ‘do nothing differ but in mean and mediocrity.’ We might therefore expect in his heroes a reluctance to sacrifice all for a difference of degree; and especially might we suppose that, after deciding an equipoise so nice as that between ‘authority and lenity,’ his governors would stake little on their decision. But in a world of adjustment and doubt they are all for compromise in theory, while in action they are extreme. They are ready in spite, almost because, of that doubt, to seal with their blood such certainty as they can attain. His statesmen, inasmuch as they do respect ‘the use and manners’ of their time, endure all things while they live, and at last die quietly, not for an abstract idea or a sublime emotion, but for the compromise of their day: though they know it for a compromise, and foresee its inevitable destruction. They have no enthusiasm, and no ecstasy. Uninspired from without, and self-gathered within, they live their lives, or lay them down, for the use and wont of their country. In reading their history an Englishman cannot but be struck by the double contrast between these tendencies of theory and action and the tendencies of theory and action finding favour in England now. Ever extreme in theory, we are all for compromise in fact; proud on the one score of our sincerity, on the other of our common sense. We are fanatics, who yet decline to persecute, still less to suffer, for our faith. And this temperance of behaviour, following hard on the violent utterance of belief, is apt to show something irrational and tame. The actor stands charged, often unjustly, with a lack of both logic and courage. The Greeks, on the other hand, who found ‘truth in a union of opposites and the aim of life in its struggle,’²² and the Romans, who aped their philosophy and outdid their deeds, are not, in Plutarch's pages, open to this disparagement. They live or die for their faiths as they found them, and so appear less extravagant and more brave. The temper is illustrated again and again by the manner in which they observe his doctrine, that rulers must maintain their authority, and at the same time ‘bear the follies of their people and companions that are in charge of government with them.’ To read the Pericles or the Pompeius, the Julius Cæsar or the Cato, is to feel that a soldier may as well complain of bullets in a battle as a statesman of stupidity in his colleagues. These are constants of the problem. Only on such terms are fighting and ruling to be had. So, too, with ‘the people’: with the many, that is, who have least chance of understanding the game, least voice in its conduct, least stake in its success. If these forget all but yesterday's service, if they look only for to-morrow's reward, the hero is not therefore to complain. This short-lived memory and this short-sighted imagination are constants also. They are regular fences in the course he has set himself to achieve. He must clear them if he can, and fall if he cannot; but he must never complain. They are conditions of success, not excuses for failure; and to name them is to be ridiculous. The Plutarchian hero never does name them. He is obstinate, but not querulous. He cares only for the State; he insists on saving it in his own way; he kills himself, if other counsels prevail. But he never complains, and he offers no explanations. Living, he prefers action before argument; dying, he chooses drama rather than defence. While he has hope, he acts like a great man; and when hope ceases, he dies like a great actor. He and his fellows seek for some compromise between authority and lenity, and, having found it, they maintain it to the end. They are wise in taking thought, and sublime in taking action: whereas now, we are courageous in our theories, but exceeding cautious in our practice. Yet who among modern politicians will say that Plutarch's men were in the wrong? Who, hoarse with shouting against the cataract of circumstance, will dare reprove the dumb-show of their lives and deaths?

I have shown from the Lycurgus, from the prefaces to the Pericles and the Phocion, and from scattered comments elsewhere, that Plutarch has something to say upon politics which, whether we agree with him or not, is at least worthy our attention. There is yet an occasion of one other kind—which he takes, I think, only twice—for speaking his own mind upon politics. After the conclusion of a long series of events, ending, for instance, in the rule of Rome over Greece, or in the substitution of the Empire for the Republic, he assembles these conclusions, at first sight to him unreasonable and unjust, and seeks to interpret them in the light of divine wisdom and justice. Now, he was nearer than we are to the two great sequences I have denoted, by seventeen centuries: he lived, we may say, in a world which they had created anew. And whereas he took in all political questions a general interest so keen that it has coloured the whole of a work not immediately addressed to politics, in these two sequences his interest was particular and personal: in the first because of his patriotism, and in the second because of his familiar converse with the best in Rome. We are happy, then, in the judgment of such a critic on the two greatest political dramas enacted in the ancient world. The human—I might say the pathetic—interest of the treatment accorded by the patriotic Greek to the growth of Roman dominion and its final extension over the Hellenistic East, will absorb the attention of many. But it offers, besides, as I think, although this has been questioned, much of political wisdom. In any case, on the one count or upon the other, I feel bound to indicate the passages in which he comments on these facts. We are not in doubt as to his general views on Imperial aggression and a ‘forward policy.’ After noting that the Romans forsook the peaceful precepts of Numa, and ‘filled all Italy with murder and blood,’ he imagines one saying: ‘But hath not Rome excelled still, and prevailed more and more in chivalry?’ And he replies:²³ ‘This question requireth a long answer, and especially unto such men as place felicity in riches, in possessing and in the greatness of empire, rather than in quiet safety, peace and concord of a common weal.’ For his part he thought with Lycurgus,²⁴ that a city should not seek to command many; but that ‘the felicity of a city, as of a private man, consisted chiefly in the exercise of virtue, and the unity of the inhabitants thereof, and that the citizens should be nobly minded (Amyot: francs de cueurs), content with their own, and temperate in their doings (attrempez en tous leurs faicts), that thereby they might maintain and keep themselves long in safety.’ But, holding this general opinion, and biassed into the bargain by his patriotism, he cannot relate the stories of Aratus and Philopœmen on the one hand, or of Flaminius and Lucullus on the other, without accepting the conclusion that the rule of Rome was at last necessary for the rational and just government of the world; and, therefore, was inevitably ordained by the Divine wisdom. Rome ‘increased and grew strong by arms and continual wars, like as piles driven into the ground, which the more they are rammed in the further they enter and stick the faster.’²⁵ For it was by obedience and self-restraint, by a ‘yielding unto reason and virtue’ that the ‘Romans came to command all other and to make themselves the mightiest people of the world.’²⁶ In Greece he finds nothing of this obedience and this self-restraint; nothing but rivalry between leaders and jealousy between States. Cleomenes, the Spartan king, Aratus and Philopœmen, both leaders of the Achæan League, are among the last of his Greek heroes. He lingers over them lovingly; yet it is Aratus who, in jealousy of Cleomenes, brings Antigonus and his Macedonians into Greece; and it is Flaminius, the Roman, who expels them. In this act some modern critics have seen only one of many cloaks for a policy of calculated aggression, but it is well to remember for what it is worth that Plutarch, the Greek patriot, saw in it simply the act of a ‘just and courteous gentleman,’ and that, according to him, the ‘only cause of the utter destruction of Greece’ must be sought earlier: when Aratus preferred the Macedonians before allowing Cleomenes a first place in the Achæan League. In the Cimon and Lucullus, even after Greece became a Roman province, he shows the same rivalries on a smaller scale. The ‘book’ opens with a story which, with a few changes, mostly of names, might be set in the Ireland of a hundred years ago. One Damon, an antique Rory of the Hills, after just provocation, collects a band of moonlighters who, with blackened faces, set upon and murder a Roman captain. The town council of Chæronea condemns Damon and his companions to death, in proof of its own innocence, and is murdered for its pains. At last Damon himself is enticed into a bathhouse, and killed. Then the Orchomenians, ‘being near neighbours unto the Chæroneans, and therefore their enemies,’ hire an ‘informer’ to accuse all the Chæroneans of complicity in the original murder; and it is only the just testimony of the Roman general, Lucullus, who chances to be marching by, which saves the town from punishment. An image is set up to Lucullus which Plutarch has seen; and even to his day ‘terrible voices and cries’ are heard by the neighbours from behind the walled-up door of the bathhouse, in which Damon had died. He knows the whole story from his childhood, and knows that in this small matter Lucullus showed the same justice and courtesy which Flaminius had displayed in a great one. For it is only the strong who can be just; and therefore to the strong there falls in the end, without appeal, the reward, or the penalty, of doing justice throughout the world. That seems to be Plutarch's ‘long answer’ to those who question the justice of the Roman Empire. He gives it most fully in the life of Flaminius, taking, as I have said, a rare occasion in order to comment on the conclusion of a long series of events. First, he sums up the results achieved by the noble Greeks, many of whose lives he has written. ‘For Agesilaus,’ he writes, ‘Lysander, Nicias, Alcibiades, and all other the famous captains of former times, had very good skill to lead an army, and to winne the battle, as well by sea as by land, but to turn their victories to any honourable benefit, or true honour among men, they could never skill of it’; especially as, apart from the Persian War, ‘all the other wars and the battles of Greece that were made fell out against themselves, and did ever bring them unto bondage: and all the tokens of triumph which ever were set up for the same was to their shame and loss.’ Having summed up the tragedy of Greece in these words, he turns to the Roman rule, and ‘The good deeds of the Romans and of Titus Quintus Flaminius,’ he says, ‘unto the Grecians, did not only reap this benefit unto them, in recompense that they were praised and honoured of all the world; but they were cause also of increasing their dominions and empire over all nations.’ So that ‘peoples and cities … procured them to come, and did put themselves into their hands’; and ‘kings and princes also (which were oppressed by other more mighty than themselves) had no other refuge but to put themselves under their protection, by reason whereof in a very short time … all the world came to submit themselves under the protection of their empire.’

In the same way, he, a republican, acquiesced in the necessity for Cæsar. Having told the story of Brutus, the last of the thirteen Romans, he falls on the other of my two occasions, and ‘Cæsar's power and government,’ he writes, ‘when it came to be established, did indeed much hurt at his first entrie and beginning unto those that did resist him: but afterwards there never followed any tyrannical nor cruel act, but contrarily, it seemed that he was a merciful Physician whom God had ordained of special grace to be Governor of the Empire of Rome, and to set all things again at quiet stay, the which required the counsel and authority of an absolute Prince.’ That is his epilogue to the longest and the mightiest drama in all history; and in it we have for once the judgment of a playwright on the ethics of his play. Yet so great a dramatist was Plutarch that even his epilogue has not saved him from the fate of his peers. While some, with our wise King James i., blame him for injustice to Cæsar,²⁷ yet others find him a niggard in his worship of Brutus and Cato. The fact is, each of his heroes is for the moment of such flesh and blood as to compel the pity of him that reads; for each is in turn the brother of all men, in their hope and in their despair. If, then, the actor chances to be Brutus and the reader King James, Plutarch is damned for a rebel; but again, if the reader be a republican, when Servilia's lover wraps him in his cloak and falls, why, then is Plutarch but the friend of a tyrant. Thus by the excellence of his art he forces us to argue that his creatures must reign in his affection as surely as for a moment they can seize upon our own. Take an early hero of the popular party—take Caius Gracchus. We know him even to his trick of vehement speech; and, knowing him so intimately, we cannot but mourn over that parting from his wife, when he left her to meet death, and she, ‘reaching after him to take him by the gown, fell to the ground and lay flatlings there a great while, speaking never a word.’ Cato, again, that hero of the other side, lives to be forbidding for his affectation; yet who but remembers the clever boy making orations full of ‘witt and vehemence,’ with a ‘certaine gravetie’ which ‘delighted his hearers and made them laugh, it did so please them’? One harks back to the precocious youngster, once the hope of the winning party, when Cato, left alone in Utica, the last soul true to a lost cause, asks the dissemblers of his sword if they ‘think to keep an old man alive by force?’ He takes kindly thought for the safety of his friends, reads the Phœdo, and dozes fitfully through the night, and behold! you are in the room with a great man dying. You feel with him that chill disillusion of the dawn, when ‘the little birds began to chirp’; you share in the creeping horror of his servants, listening outside the door; and when they give a ‘shriek for fear’ at the ‘noise of his fall, overthrowing a little table of geometry hard by his bed,’ it is almost a relief to know that the recovered sword has done its work. And who can help loving Pompey, with his ‘curtesie in conversation; so that there was never man that requested anything with less ill will than he, nor that more willingly did pleasure unto any man when he was requested. For he gave without disdain and took with great honour’? ‘The cast and soft moving of his eyes … had a certain resemblance of the statues and images of King Alexander.’ Even ‘Flora the curtisan’—Villon's ‘Flora la belle Romaine’—pined away for love of him when he turned her over to a friend. He is all compact of courage and easy despair: now setting sail in a tempest, for ‘it is necessity, I must go, but not to live’; and again, at Pharsalia, at the first reverse ‘forgetting that he was Pompey the Great,’ and leaving the field to walk silently away. And that last scene of all: when on a desolate shore a single ‘infranchised bondman’ who had ‘remained ever’ by the murdered hero, ‘sought upon the sands and found at the length a piece of an old fisher's boat enough to serve to burn his naked body with’; and so a veteran who had been with him in his old wars happens upon the afflicting scene; and you hear him hail the other lonely figure: ‘O friend, what art thou that preparest the funerals of Pompey the Great? … Thou shalt not have all this honour alone … to bury the only and most famous Captain of the Romans!’

There is sorcery in Plutarch's presentments of these politicians, which may either blind to the import of the drama they enact, or beguile into thinking that he sympathises by turns with the ideal of every leader he portrays. But behind the glamour of their living and the glory of their death, a relentless progression of political causes and effects conducts inevitably to Cæsar's personal rule. In no other book do we see so full an image of a nation's life, because in no other is the author so little concerned to prove the truth of any one theory, or the nobility of any one sentiment. He is detached—indeed, absorbed—in another purpose. He exhibits his thirteen vivid personalities, holding, mostly by birth, to one of two historic parties, and inheriting with those parties certain traditional aspirations and beliefs; yet by showing men as they are, he contrives to show that truth and nobility belong to many divergent beliefs and to many conflicting aspirations. Doubtless he has his own view, his rooted abhorrence to the rule of one man; and this persuasion inclines him now to the Popular Party in its opposition to Sulla, and again to the Senate in its opposition to Cæsar. But still, by the sheer force of his realism, he drives home, as no other writer has ever done, the great truth that theories and sentiments are in politics no more than flags and tuckets in a battle: that in fighting and in government it is, after all, the fighting and the governing which must somehow or another be achieved. And, since in this world governing there must be, the question at any moment is: What are the possible conditions of government? In the latter days of the Republic it appears from the Lives that two sets of causes had led to a monstrous development of individuals, in whose shadow all lower men must wither away. So Sertorius sails for the ‘Fortunate Islands’; Cato is juggled to Cyprus; Cicero is banished; while Lucullus, out-metalled by Pompey on his own side, ‘lay still and took his pleasure, and would no more meddle with the commonwealth,’ and the unspeakable Bibulus ‘kept him close in his ‘house for eight months’ space, and only sent out bills.’ At last you have the Triumvirate; and then, with Crassus killed, the two protagonists face to face: ‘whose names the strange and far nations understood before the name of Romans, so great were their victories.’ Given the Roman dominion and two parties with the traditions of Marius and Sulla behind them, there was nothing for it but that one or other should prove its competence to rule; and no other way of achieving this than finding the man and giving him the power. The Marians found Cæsar, and in him a man who could find power for himself. The political heirs of Sulla found Cato and Brutus, and Lucullus and Pompey; but none of these was Cæsar, and, such as they were, the Senate played them off the one against the other. Bemused with theories and sentiments, they neither saw the necessity, nor seized the means, of governing a world that cried aloud for government. In Plutarch you watch the play; and, whatever you may think of the actors—of Crassus or Cato, Pompey or Cæsar—of the non-actors you can think nothing. Bibulus, with his ‘bills,’ and the Senate, which bade Pompey disband his troops, stand for ever as types of formal incompetence. Plutarch shows that it is wiser and more righteous to win the game by accepting the rules, even if sometimes you must strain and break them, than to leave the table because you dislike the rules. Instead of quarrelling with the rules and losing the game, the Senate should have won the game, and then have changed the rules. This Cæsar did, as Plutarch the republican allows, to the saving of his country and the lasting profit of mankind. Doubtless he shows the argument in action, and points the moral only in an epilogue. But living, as we do, after the politicians of so many ages and so many parties have laid competing claims to the glory of his chiefs, this is our gain. Brutus and Cato, heroes of the Renaissance and gods of liberty a hundred years ago, we are told by eminent historians, were selfish oligarchs: bunglers who, having failed to feed the city or to flush the drains, wrote ‘sulky letters’²⁸ about the one man who could do these things, and govern the world into the bargain. Between these views it skills not to decide. It is enough to take up the Lives and to rejoice that Plutarch, writing one hundred and fifty years after the foundering of the Republic, dwelt rather on its heroes who are for ever glorious than on its theories which were for ever shamed.

In his book are three complete plays: the brief tragedy of Athens—that land of ‘honey and hemlock,’ offering her cup of sweet and deadly elements to the dreamers of every age; with the drama of the merging of Greece in the dominion of Rome and the drama of the overthrow of the Roman Republic. And the upshot of all three is that the playwright insists on the culture of the individual for the sake of the State. The political teacher behind the political dramatist inculcates, no theory of politics but, an attitude towards life. Good is the child of custom and conflict, not the reward of individual research; so he shows you life as one battle in which the armies are ordered States. Every man, therefore, must needs be a citizen, and every citizen a soldier in the ranks. For this service, life being a battle, he must cultivate the soldier's virtues of courage and courtesy. The word is North's, and smacks something more of chivalry than Amyot's humanité; yet both may be taken to point Plutarch's moral, not only that victory is impossible without kindness between comrades, and intolerable without forbearance between foes, but also, that in every age of man's progress to perfection through strife these qualities must be developed to a larger growth measured by the moral needs of war between nations and parties. He insists again and again on this need of courtesy in a world wherein all men are in duty bound to hold opposite opinions, for which they must in honour live and die. For this his Sertorius, his Lucullus, and his Mummius, sketched in a passing allusion, are chiefly memorable; while of Cæsar he writes that ‘amongst other honours’ his enemies gave him ‘he rightly deserved this, that they should build him a Temple of Clemency.’ Cæsar, lighting from his horse to embrace Cicero, the arch-instigator of the opposition he had overthrown, and walking with him ‘a great way a-foot’; or Demetrius, who, the Athenians having defaulted, gathers them into the theatre, and then, when they expect a massacre, forgives them in a speech—these are but two exemplars of a style which Plutarch ever praises. And if his standard of courtesy in victory be high, not lower is his standard of courage in defeat. Demonsthenes is condemned for that ‘he took his banishment unmanly,’ while Phocion, his rival, is made glorious for his irony in death: paying, when the stock ran out, for his own hemlock, ‘sith a man cannot die at Athens for nothing.’ In defeat Plutarch's heroes sometimes doubted if life were worth living; but they never doubted there were things in life worth dying for. Even Demosthenes is redeemed in his eyes because, at the last, ‘sith the god Neptune denied him the benefit of his sanctuary, he betook him to a greater, and that was Death.’ So often does Plutarch applaud the act of suicide, and so scornfully does he revile those who, like the last king of Macedon, forwent their opportunity, that we might easily misconceive his ethics. But ‘when a man will willingly kill himself, he must not do it to be rid of pains and labour, but it must have an honourable respect and action. For, to live or die for his own respect, that cannot but be dishonourable. … And therefore I am of opinion that we should not yet cast off the hope we have to serve our country in time to come; but when all hope faileth us, then we may easily make ourselves away when we list.’ Thus, after Selasia, the last of the kings of Sparta, who recalled the saying of Lycurgus: that, with ‘great personages … the end of their life should be no more idle and unprofitable then the rest of their life before.’ And this is the pith of Plutarch's political matter: that men may not with honour live unto themselves, but must rather live and die in respect to the State.

II

Side by side, and in equal honour, with Plutarch the dramatist of politics there should stand, I think—not Plutarch the moralist but—Plutarch the unrivalled painter of men. Much has been written, and rightly written, of his perennial influence upon human character and human conduct; yet outside the ethics of citizenship he insisted on little that is not now a platitude. The interest of his morals springs from their likeness to our own; the wonder of his portraitures must ever be new and strange. Indeed, we may speak of his art much as he writes, through North, of the ‘stately and sumptuous buildings’ which Pericles ‘gave to be built in the cittie of Athens.’ For ‘it looketh at this daye as if it were but newly done and finished, there is such a certaine kynde of florishing freshnes in it, which letteth that the injurie of time cannot impaire the sight thereof: as if every one of those foresaid workes had some living spirite in it, to make it seeme young and freshe: and a soul that lived ever, which kept them in good continuing state.’ Yet despite this ‘florishing freshnes’ the painter has been slighted for the preacher, and for this preference of the ethical before the æsthetic element in the Lives, and of both before their political quality, Plutarch has mostly himself to thank. Just as he masks a political framework under a professed devotion to the study of individual souls, so, when he comes to the study of these souls, he puts you off by declaring a moral aim in language that may easily mislead. ‘When first I began these lives,’ he writes in the Paulus Æmilius, ‘my intent was to profit other: but since, continuing and going on, I have much profited myself by looking into these histories, as if I looked into a glasse, to frame and facion my life, to the moold and patterne of these vertuous noble men, and doe as it were lodge them with me, one after another.’ And again, ‘by keeping allwayes in minde the acts of the most noble, vertuous and best geven men of former age … I doe teache and prepare my selfe to shake of and banishe from me, all lewde and dishonest condition, if by chaunce the companie and conversation of them whose companie I keepe … doe acquaint me with some unhappie or ungratious touche.’ Now, as matter of fact, he does not keep always in mind these, and these only. Doubtless his aim was moral; yet assuredly he never did pursue it by denoting none save the virtuous acts of the ‘most noble, vertuous, and best geven men.’ On the contrary, his practice is to record their every act of significance, whether good or bad. I admit that he does this ever with a most happy and most gracious touch; for his ‘first study’ is to write a good man's ‘vertues at large,’ and if ‘certaine faultes’ be there, ‘to pass them over lightly of reverent shame to the mere frayelty of man's nature.’²⁹ He lays the ruin of his country at the door of Aratus alone; but ‘this,’ he adds, ‘that we have written of Aratus … is not so much to accuse him as to make us see the frayelty and weakness of man's nature: the which, though it have never so excellent vertues, cannot yet bring forth such perfit frute, but that it hath ever some mayme and blemishe.’³⁰ That is his wont in portraying the ill deeds of the virtuous; and, for their opposites, ‘as I hope,’ he writes in the preface to the Demetrius and Antonius, ‘it shall not be reprehended in me if amongst the rest I put in one or two paier of suche, as living in great place and accompt, have increased their fame with infamy.’ ‘Phisicke,’ he submits in defence of such a choice, ‘dealeth with diseases, musicke with discordes, to thend to remove them, and worke their contraries, and the great Ladies of all other artes (Amyot: les plus parfaittes sciences de toutes), Temperaunce, Justice, and Wisdom, doe not onely consider honestie, uprightness and profit: but examine withall, the nature and effects of lewdness, corruption and damage’; for ‘innocencie,’ he goes on, ‘which vaunteth her want of experience in undue practices: men call simplicitie (Amyot: une bestise) and ignoraunce of things that be necessary and good to be knowen.’ His, then, is a moral standpoint; and yet it is one from which he is impelled to study—(and that as closely as the keenest apostle of ‘art for art’)—all matters having truth and significance; whether they be evil or good. For the sake of what is good, he will neither distort truth nor disfigure beauty. Rather, by the exercise of a fine selection, he will create a harmony between the three; so that, embracing everything except the trivial, his art reflects the world as it shows in the sight of sane and healthy-hearted men.

His method naturally differs from the method of some modern historians; but his canon of evidence, too lax for their purpose, is admirably suited to his own. For instance, in telling of Solon's meeting with Crœsus, he will not reject so famous an history on chronological grounds: because, in the first place, no two are agreed about chronology, and in the second, the story is ‘very agreeable to Solon's manners and nature.’ That is his chief canon; and though the results he attains by it are in no wise doubt-proof, they yield a truer, because a completer, image than do the lean and defective outlines determined by excluding all but contemporary evidence. These outlines belong rather to the science of anthropometry than to the art of portraiture; and Plutarch the painter refuses such restraints. His imagination having taken the imprint of his hero, he will supplement it from impressions left in report and legend, so long, at any rate, as they tally with his own ideal. Nor is there better cause for rejecting such impressions than there is for rejecting the fossils of primeval reptiles whose carnal economy has perished. Given those fossils and a knowledge of morphology, the palæontologist will refashion the dragons of the prime; and in the same way Plutarch, out of tradition and his knowledge of mankind, paints you the true Themistocles. His, indeed, is the surer warrant, since there have been no such changes in human nature as science shows in animal design; so that the method is safe so long as a nation's legends have not been crushed out of shape by the superincumbent layers of a conquering race. Moreover, Plutarch makes no wanton use of his imagination: give him contemporary evidence, and he abides by it, rejecting all besides. In his account of Alexander's death, having the court journal before him, he repudiates later embellishments: ‘for all these were thought to be written by some, for lyes and fables, because they would have made the ende of this great tragedie lamentable and pitifull.’

His results are, of course, unequal. He cannot always revive the past, nor quicken the dead anew. Who can? His gallery includes some pieces done on a faded convention, faint in colour and angular in line, mere pretexts for a parade of legendary names: with certain sketches, as those of Cimon and Aristides, which are hack-work turned out to complete a pair. But first and last there stand out six or seven realisations of living men, set in an atmosphere, charged with a vivid intensity of expression, and striking you in much the same way as the sight of a few people scattered through a big room strikes you when you enter unawares. And when you have done staring at these, you will note a half-dozen more which are scarce less vigorously detached. Plutarch's first masterpiece is the Themistocles, and there is never a touch in it but tells. Even as you watch him at work, you are conscious, leaping out from beneath his hand, of the ambitious boy, ‘sodainely taken with desire of glorie,’ who, from his first entry into public life, ‘stoode at pyke with the greatest and mightiest personnes.’ But you soon forget the artist in his creation. You have eyes for nothing but Themistocles himself: now walking with his father by the seashore; now, after Marathon ‘a very young man many times solitary alone devising with himself’—in this way passing his boyhood, for ‘Miltiades victory would not let him sleep.’ Then the ambitious boy develops into the political artist; rivals Aristides, as Fox rivalled Pitt; and is found loving his art for its own sake, above his country, above his ambition even, wrapt as he is, through good fortune and ill, in the expert's delight in his own accomplishment. Knowing what all men should do, and swaying every several man to do it, he controls both individuals and nations with the inspired prescience of a master conducting his own symphony. He has all the devices at his fingers' ends. In the streets he will ‘speake to every citizen by his name, no man telling him their names’; and in the council he will manage even Eurybiades, with that ‘Strike an thou wilt, so thou wilt heare me,’ which has been one of the world's words since its utterance. Now with ‘pleasaunt conceits and answers,’ now—with a large poetic appeal—‘pointing’ his countrymen ‘the waye unto the sea’; this day, deceiving his friends, the next overawing his enemies; with effrontery or chicane, with good-fellowship or reserve; but ever with infinite dexterity, a courage that never falters, and a patience that never wearies: he keeps the shuttle of his thought quick-flying through the web of intrigue. And all for the fun of weaving! Till, at the last, a banished man, being commanded by his Persian master to fight against Greece, ‘he tooke a wise resolution with himselfe, to make suche an ende of his life, as the fame thereof deserved.’ After sacrificing to the gods, and feasting his friends, he drank poison, ‘and so ended his dayes in the cittie of Magnesia, ‘after he had lived threescore and five yeres, and the most parte of them allwayes in office and great charge.’ Plutarch produces this notable piece, not by comment and analysis but, simply by setting down his sitter's acts and words. It is in the same way that he paints his Alcibiades, with his beauty and his lisp: ‘the grace of his eloquence, the strength and valiantness of his bodie … his wisdom and experience in marshall affayres’; and again, with his insolence and criminal folly to the women who loved him as to the nations he betrayed. He fought, like the Cid, now for and now against his own. But ‘he had such pleasaunt comely devises with him that no man was of so sullen a nature, but he left him merrie, nor so churlishe, but he would make him gentle.’ And when he died, they felt that their country died with him; for they had some little poore hope left that they were not altogether cast away so long as Alcibiades lived.’

In the first rank of Plutarch's masterpieces come, with these two, the Marius, the Cato, the Alexander, the Demetrius, the Antonius, and the Pompey. Modern writers have again and again repainted some of these portraits; but their colour has all been borrowed from Plutarch. These heroes live for all time in the Parallel Lives. There you shall learn the fashion of their faces, and the tricks of their speech; their seat on horseback and the cut of their clothes; with every tone and every gesture, all the charms and all the foibles that made them the men they were. Marcus Cato is what we call a ‘character.’ He hated doctors and, no doubt, schoolmasters; for did he not educate his own son, writing for him ‘goodly histories, in great letters with his oune hande’? He taught the boy grammar and law, ‘to throw a dart, to play at the sword, to vawt, to ride a horse, and to handle all sortes of weapons, … to fight with fistes, to abide colde and heate, and to swimme over a swift runninge river.’ A ‘new man’ from a little village, his ideal was Manlius Curius sitting ‘by the fyer's side seething of perseneapes,’ and he tried to educate everybody on the same lines. Being Censor, he would proceed by way of imprisonment; but at all times he was ready to instruct with apophthegms and ‘wise sayings,’ and ‘he would taunte a marvelous fatte man’ thus: ‘See, sayd he, what good can such a body do to the commonwealth, that from his chine to his coddepece is nothing but belly?’ This is but one of many ‘wise sayings’ reported of him, whereby ‘we may the easilier conjecture his maners and nature.’³¹ Even the Alexander seems a new thing still; so clear is the colouring, so vigorous and expressive the pose. ‘Naturally,’ you read, ‘he had a very fayre white colour, mingled also with red,’ and ‘his body had so sweete a smell of itself, that all the apparell he wore next unto his body took thereof a passing delightful savor, as if it had been perfumed.’ This was his idea of a holiday: ‘After he was up in the morning, first of all he would doe sacrifice to the goddes, and then would goe to diner, passing awaie all the rest of the daye, in hunting, writing something, taking up some quarrell between soldiers, or els in studying. If he went any journey of no hastie busines, he would exercise himselfe by the waie as he went, shooting in his bowe, or learning to get up or out of his charret sodenly, as it ranne. Oftentimes also for his pastime he would hunt the foxe, or ketch birdes, as appeareth in his booke of remembrances for everie daie. Then when he came to his lodging, he would enter into his bath and rubbe and nointe himselfe: and would aske his pantelers and carvers if his supper were ready. He would ever suppe late, and was very curious to see, that every man at his bourde were a like served, and would sit longe at the table, bycause he ever loved to talke.’ But take him at his work of leading others to the uttermost parts of the earth. Being parched with thirst, in the desert, ‘he tooke the helmet with water, and perceiving that the men of armes that were about him, and had followed him, did thrust out their neckes to look upon this water, he gave the water back againe unto them that had geven it him, and thanked them but drank none of it. For, said he, if I drink alone all these men here will faint.’ What a touch! And what wonder if his men ‘beganne to spurre their horses, saying that they were not wearie nor athirst, nor did think themselves mortall, so long as they had such a king’! There is more of self-restraint in Plutarch's portrait than appears in later copies. Alexander passes by the ladies of Persia ‘without any sparke of affection towardes them … preferring the beautie of his continencie, before their swete faire faces.’ But he was ever lavish of valour, loving ‘his honour more then his kingdome or his life’; and it is with a ‘marvelous faier white plume’ in his helmet that he plunges first into the river at Granicus, and single-handed engages the army on the further bank. Centuries later at Ivry, Henri-Quatre, who learned Plutarch at his mother's knee, forgot neither the feather nor the act. But the dead Alexander never lacked understudies. All the kings, his successors, ‘did but counterfeate’ him ‘in his purple garments, and in numbers of souldiers and gardes about their persones, and in a certaine facion and bowing of their neckes a little, and in uttering his speech with a high voyce.’ One of them is Demetrius the Fort-gainer,’ with ‘his wit and manners … that were both fearefull and pleasaunt unto men that frequented him’; his ‘sweete countenance … and incomparable majestie’; ‘more wantonly geven to follow any lust and pleasure than any king that ever was; yet alwayes very careful and diligent in dispatching matters of importance.’ A leader of forlorn hopes and lewd masquerades, juggling with kingdoms as a mountebank with knives; the lover of innumerable queens and the taker of a thousand towns; in his defeat, ‘not like unto a king, but like a common player when the play is done’; drinking himself to death for that he found ‘it was that maner of life he had long desired’—this Poliorcetes, I say, has furnished Plutarch with the matter for yet another masterpiece, which indeed is one of the greater feats in romantic realism.

Of the Antonius with his ‘Asiatic phrase,’ it is enough to say that it is Shakespeare's Antony; and at the Pompey I have already glanced. The Cæsar is only less wonderful than these because the man is lost in the leader. Julius travels so fast, that you catch but glimpses as he races in his litter through the night; ever dictating to his secretaries, and writing by the way. But now and again you see him plainly—‘leane, white and soft-skinned, and often subject to head-ache’; filling his soldiers with awe, not at his valiantnesse at putting himself at every instant in such manifest danger, since they knew 'twas his greedy desire of honor that set him a fire’ … but because he ‘continued all labour and hardnesse more than his bodie could beare.’ A strange ruler of the world, this epileptic, ‘fighting always with his disease’! He amazes friends and enemies by the swiftness of his movements, while Pompey journeys as in state from land to land. Pompey was of plebeian extraction, Julius was born into one of the sixteen surviving patrician gentes; yet Julius burns with the blasting heat of a new man's endeavour, Pompey as with the banked fires of hereditary self-esteem. And through all the commotion and the coil he is still mindful of the day of his youth ‘when he had been acquainted with Servilia, who was extreamilie in love with him. And because Brutus was boorne in that time when their love was hottest he persuaded himself that he begat him.’³² What of anguish does this not add to the sweep of the gesture wherewith the hero covered his face from the pedant's sword! With the Cæsar may stand the Marius, and the Sylla: Sulla the lucky man, felix, Epaphroditus, beloved of all women and the victor in every fight, who ‘when he was in his chiefest authoritie would commonly eate and drinke with the most impudent jeasters and scoffers, and all such rake helles, as made profession of counterfeate mirth.’ He laughed his way to complete political success; he was fortunate even in the weather for his funeral; and, as he epitaphed himself, ‘no man did ever passe him, neither in doing good to his friends, nor in doing mischief to his enemies.’ Plutarch's Lucullus, being young and ambitious, marches further into the unknown East than any Roman had ventured. He fords the river on foot with the countless hosts of Tigranes on the farther shore, ‘himselfe the foremost man,’ and marches ‘directly towardes his enemy, armed with an “anima” of steele, made with scalloppe shelles, shining like the sunne.’ He urges on through summer and winter, till the rivers are ‘congealed with ice,’ so that no man can ‘passe over by forde: for they did no sooner enter but the ise brake and cut the vaines and sinews of the horse legges.’ His men murmur, but he presses on: till ‘the country being full of trees, woddes and forestes,’ they are ‘through wet with the snow that fell upon them,’ and at last they mutiny and flatly refuse to take another step into the unknown. This is a Lucullus we forget. Plutarch gives the other one as well, and the two together make for him ‘an auncient comedy,’ the beginning whereof is tedious, but the latter end—with its ‘feasts and bankets,’ ‘masks and mummeries,’ and ‘dauncing with torches,’ its ‘fine built chambers and high raised turrets to gaze a farre, environed about with conduits of water’; its superlative cook, too, and its ‘library ever open to all comers’—is a matter to rejoice the heart of man. Crassus and Cicero complete his group of second-bests: Cicero ‘dogge leane,’ and ‘a little eater,’ ‘so earnest and vehement in his oration that he mounted still with his voyce into the highest tunes: insomuch that men were affrayed it would one day put him in hazard of his life.’ Here I may pause to note that Plutarch's references to public speaking are all observed. He writes from experience, and you might compile a manual of the art from him. Well did he know the danger of fluent earnestness. His Caius Gracchus ‘had a servant … who, with an instrument of musicke he had … ever stoode behind him; and when he perceived his Maister's voyce was a little too lowde, and that through choller he exceeded his ordinary speache, he played a soft stoppe behind him, at the sonde whereof Caius immediately fell from his extreamitie and easilie came to himself againe.’ Thus, too, his Demosthenes and Cicero sets forth full instructions for removing every other blemish of delivery.³³

The painter of incident is scarce less great than the painter of men. Plutarch's picture of Cicero is completed by a presentment of his death, in which the artist's imagination rises to its full height. Hunted down by Antony's sworders, the orator is overtaken at night in a by-lane; he stretches out his head from the litter to look his murderers in the face; and ‘his head and his beard being all white, and his face leane and wrinckled, for the extreame sorrowes he had taken, divers of them that were by held their handes before their eyes, whilest Herennius did cruelly murder him.’ Then the head was set up by Antony ‘over the pulpit for orations,’ and ‘this was a fearefull and horrible sight unto the Romanes, who thought they saw not Ciceroes face, but an image of Antonius life and dispositions’ (Amyot: une image de l'âme et de la nature d'Antonius). This gift, at times almost appalling, of imaginative presentment, is the distinctive note of Plutarch's art. He uses it freely in his backgrounds, which are animated as are those in certain pictures of a bygone mode; so that behind his heroes armies engage, fleets are sunk, towns are sacked, and citadels escaladed. Sometimes his effect is produced by a rare restraint. In the Alcibiades, for instance, he tells how the Sicilian expedition was mooted which was to ruin both the hero and his country; and, as Carlyle might have done, at the corner of every street he shows you the groups of young men bragging of victory, and drawing plans of Syracuse in the dust. Sometimes the touch of terror is more immediate. Take his description of the Teutons from the Marius. Their voices were ‘wonderful both straunge and beastly’; so Marius kept his men close till they should grow accustomed to such dreadful foes. Meanwhile the Teutons ‘were passing by his campe six dayes continually together’: ‘they came raking by,’ and ‘marching all together in good array; making a noyse with their harness all after one sorte, they oft rehearsed their own name, Ambrons, Ambrons, Ambrons’; and the Romans watched them, listening to the monotonous, unhuman call. Here and elsewhere Plutarch conveys, with a peculiar magic, the sense of great bodies of men and of the movements thereof. Now and then he secures his end by reporting a word or two from those that are spying upon others from afar. This is how he gives the space and silence that precede a battle. Tigranes, with his innumerable host, is watching Lucullus and the Romans, far away on the farther shore of the river. ‘They seemed but a handful,’ and kept ‘following the streame to meete with some forde. … Tigranes thought they had marched away, and called for Taxiles, and sayd unto him, laughing: “Dost thou see, Taxiles, those goodly Roman legyons, whom thou praisest to be men so invincible, how they flie away now?” Taxiles answered the king againe: “I would your good fortune (O king) might work some miracle this day: for doubtless it were a straunge thing that the Romanes should flie. They are not wont to wear their brave cotes and furniture uppon their armour, when they meane onely but to marche in the fieldes: neither do they carie their shieldes and targets uncased, nor their burganets bare on their heades, as they do at this present, having throwen away their leather cases and coveringes. But out of doubt, this goodly furniture we see so bright and glittering in our faces, is a manifest sign that they intend to fight, and that they marche towards us.” Taxiles had no sooner spoken these wordes, but Lucullus, in the view of his enemies, made his ensign bearer to turne sodainely that carried the first Eagle, and the bands tooke their places to passe the river in order of battell.’ The proportion of the two armies, and the space between; the sun flashing on the distant shields; the long suspense; the king's laugh breaking the silence, which yet grows tenser, till suddenly the Romans wheel into line: in truth, they have been few between Plutarch and Tolstoi to give the scale and perspective of battles by observing such proportion in their art! Here Lucullus and a handful of Romans, like Clive and his Englishmen, overthrew a nation in arms; elsewhere Plutarch gives the other chance, and renders with touches equally subtle and direct the deepening nightmare of Crassus' march into the desert. He tells of the Parthian ‘kettle drommes, hollow within,’ and hung about with ‘little bells and copper rings,’ with which ‘they all made a noise everywhere together, and it is like a dead sounde.’ Does it not recall the Aztec wardrums on the Noche Triste? Intent, too, on creating his impression of terror, this rare artist proceeds from the sense of hearing to the sense of sight. ‘The Romanes being put in feare with this dead sounde, the Parthians straight threw the clothes and coverings from them that hid their armour, and then showed their bright helmets and curaces of Margian tempered steele, that glared like fire; and their horses barbed with steele and copper.’ They canter round and round the wretched enemy, shooting their shafts as they go; and the ammunition never fails, for camels come up ‘loden with quivers full of arrowes.’ The Romans are shot through one by one; and when Crassus ‘prayed and besought them to charge … they showed him their handes fast nailed to their targets with arrowes, and their feete likewise shot thorow and nailed to the ground: so as they could neither flie, nor yet defende themselves.’ Thus they died, one before the other, ‘a cruell lingring death, crying out for anguish and paine they felt’; and ‘turning and tormenting themselves upon the sande, they broke the arrowes sticking in them.’ The realism of it! And the pathos of Crassus' speech, when his son's head is shown to him, which ‘killed the Romanes hartes’! ‘The grief and sorrow of this losse (my fellowes),’ said he, ‘is no man's but mine, mine only; but the noble successe and honor of Rome remaineth still invincible, so long as you are yet living.’ After these two pictures of confidence and defeat I should like to give that one of the Romans after Pydna, where Paulus Æmilius was thought to have lost his son. It is a wonderful resurrection of departed life. There are the groups round the camp-fires; the sudden clustering of torches towards the one dark and silent tent; and then the busy lights crossing and recrossing, and scattering over the field. You hear first the droning songs of the tired and happy soldiers; then silence; then cries of anxiety and mournful echoes; then, of a sudden, comes the reappearance, ‘all bloudied with new bloude like the swift-running grey hound fleshed with the bloude of the hare,’ of him, the missing youth, ‘that Scipio which afterwards destroyed both the citties of Carthage and Numantium.’

It is hard to analyse the art, for the means employed are of the simplest; yet it is certain that they do recall to such as have known, and that they must suggest to others who have not, those sights and sounds and sensations which combine into a special enchantment about the time of the fall of darkness upon bodies of men who have drunk excitement and borne toil together in the day. How intense, too, the flash of imagination with which the coming Africanus is projected on the canvas! And the book abounds in such lightning impressions. Thus, Hannibal cracks a soldier's joke before Cannæ; he pitches the quip into his host, like a pebble into the pond; and the broken stillness ripples away down all the ranks in widening rings of laughter.³⁴ Sometimes the sketch is even slighter, and is yet convincing: as when the elder Scipio, being attacked by Cato for his extravagant administration, declares his ‘intent to go to the wars with full sayles.’ These are not chance effects but masterstrokes of imagination; yet that imagination, vivid and vivifying as it is, never leads Plutarch to attempt the impossible. He remains the supreme artist, and is content with suggesting—what is incapable of representation—that sense of the portentous, the overpowering, which is apparent immediately before, or immediately behind, some notable conjunction. Alexander sounds the charge which is to change the fortunes of the world, and Arbela is rendered in a few lines. But up till the instant of his sounding it, you are told of his every act. Plutarch, proceeding as leisurely as his hero, creates suspense out of delay. You are told that Alexander slept soundly far into the morning, and that he was called three times. You are told how carefully he dressed, and of each article of armour and apparel he put on: his ‘Sicilian cassocke,’ his ‘brigandine of many foldes of canvas,’ ‘his head peece bright as silver,’ and ‘his coller sute like to the same all set full of precious stones.’ The battle has begun between the outposts, and he is still riding down the lines on a hack: ‘to spare Bucephal, because he was then somewhat olde.’ He mounted the great horse ‘always at the last moment; and as soone as he was gotten up on his backe, the trumpet sounded, and he gave charge.’ To-day it is made to seem as if that moment would never come; but at the last all things being ready, ‘he tooke his launce in his left hande and, holding up his right hande unto heaven, besought the goddes … that if it were true, he was begotten of Jupiter, it would please them that day to helpe him and to incorage the Græcians. The sooth-sayer Aristander was then a-horsebacke hard by Alexander apparelled all in white, and a croune of gold on his head, who shewed Alexander when he made his prayer, an Eagle flying over his head, and pointing directly towards his enemies. This marvellously encouraged all the armie that saw it, and with this joy, the men of armes of Alexander's side, encouraging one another, did set spurres to their horse to charge upon the enemies.’ Until the heroic instant you are compelled to note the hero's every deliberate movement. He and the little group of gleaming figures about him are the merest specks in the plain before the Macedonian army, itself but a handful in comparison to the embattled nations in front. The art is perfect in these flash-pictures of great moments in time: in the Athenians map-drawing in the dust, in the Romans watching the Ambrons raking by, in Tigranes' laugh, in Hannibal's joke, in Alexander's supreme gesture; and how instant in each the imaginative suggestion of dragging hours before rapid and irreparable events! Equally potent are the effects which Plutarch contrives by revealing all the consequences of a disaster in some swift, far-reaching glimpse. Thus, when Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, ‘Rome itself was filled up with the flowing repaire of all the people who came thither like droves of cattell.’ And thus does Sparta receive the news of her annihilation:—‘At that time there was by chance a common feast day in the citie … when as the messenger arrived that brought the news of the battell lost at Leuctres. The Ephori knowing then that the rumor ranne all about; that they were all undone, and how they had lost the signorie and commaundement over all Grece: would not suffer them for all this to breake off their daunce in the Theater, nor the citie in anything to chaunge the forme of their feast, but sent unto the parentes to everie man's house, to let them understande the names of them that were slaine at the battell, they themselves remaining still in the Theater to see the daunces and sportes continued, to judge who carried the best games away. The next morning when everie man knew the number of them that were slaine, and of those also that escaped: the parentes and frendes of them that were dead, met in the market place, looking cheerfully of the matter, and one of them embraced another. On thother side the parentes of them that scaped, kept their houses with their wives, as folk that mourned. … The mothers of them, that kept their sonnes which came from the battell, were sad and sorrowfull, and spake not a word. Contrairily, the mothers of them that were slaine, went friendly to visite one another, to rejoyce together.’³⁵ There is no word of the fight. As Thackeray gives you Waterloo in a picture of Brussels, so Plutarch gives you Leuctra, and with more of beauty and pathos, in a picture of Sparta. Of the Roman defeat at Cannæ there is a full and wonderful account; but what an effective touch is added with ‘the Consul Terentius Varro returning backe to Rome, with the shame of his extreame misfortune and overthrowe, that he durste not looke upon any man: the Senate notwithstanding, and all the people following them, went to the gates of the cittie to meete him, and dyd honourably receyve him’!

In these passages Plutarch, following the course of Greek tragedy, and keeping the action off the stage, gives the reverberation and not the shock of fate; but in many others the stark reality of his painting is its own sufficient charm. He abounds in unfamiliar aspects of familiar places: places he invests with (as it were) the magic born of a wandering son's return. Here is his Athens in her decrepitude. ‘The poore citie of Athens which had escaped from so many warres, tyrannies and civil dissensions,’ is now besieged by Sulla without, and oppressed by the tyrant Aristion within; and in his presentment of her condition there is, surely, a foreshadowing of those dark ages when historic sites became the scenes of new tragedies that were merely brutal and insignificant. At Athens ‘men were driven for famine to eate feverfew that grew about the castell’; also, they ‘caused old shoes and old oyle potes to be sodden to deliver some savor unto that which they did eate.’ Meanwhile ‘the tyrant himselfe did nothing all day long but cramme in meat, drinke dronke, daunce, maske, scoff and flowte at the enemies (suffering the holy lampe of Minerva to go out for lack of oyle).’ Is there not a grimness of irony about this picture of the drunken and sinister buffoon sitting camped in the Acropolis, like a toad in a ruined temple, ‘magnifying the dedes of Theseus and insulting the priestes’? At last the Roman enters the city about midnight ‘with a wonderfull fearefull order, making a marvellous noise with a number of hornes and sounding of trompets, and all his army with him in order of battell, crying, “To the sack, to the sack: Kill, kill.”’³⁶ A companion picture is that of a Syracuse Thucydides never knew.³⁷ Archimedes is her sole defence; and thanks to him, the Roman ships are ‘taken up with certaine engines fastened within one contrary to an other, which made them turne in the ayer like a whirlegigge, and so cast them upon the rockes by the towne walles, and splitted them all to fitters, to the great spoyle and murder of the persons that were within them.’ Elsewhere the Mediterranean pirates, polite as our own highwaymen, are found inviting noble Romans to walk the plank;³⁸ for Plutarch never misses a romantic touch. Some of his strongest realisations are of moments when fate hangs by a hair: as that breathless and desperate predicament of Aratus and his men on their ladders against the walls of Sicyon; with the ‘curste curres’ that would not cease from barking; the captain of the watch ‘visiting the soldiers with a little bell’; ‘the number of torches and a great noyse of men that followed him’; the great greyhound kept in a little tower, which began to answer the curs at large ‘with a soft girning: but when they came by the tower where he lay, he barked out alowde, that all the place thereabouts rang of his barking’; the ladders shaking and bowing ‘by reason of the weight of the men, unless they did come up fayer and softly one after another,’ till at last, ‘the cocks began to crowe, and the country folke that brought things to the market to sell, began to come apace to the towne out of every quarter.’³⁹ Later in the same life you have the escalading of the Acrocorinthus: when Aratus and the storming party, with their shoes off, being lost on the slopes, ‘sodainely, even as it had been by miracle, the moone appearing through the clowdes, brought them to that part of the wall where they should be, and straight the moone was shadowed againe’; so they cut down the watch, but one man escaped, and ‘the trompets forthwith sounded the alarom … all the citie was in an uprore, the streets were straight full of people running up and downe, and of lights in every corner.’ Plutarch's management of light, I should remark, is always astonishingly real; he never leaves the sun or the moon out of his picture, nor the incidence of clouds and of the dust of battle. Thus varied his sunshine leaps and wavers on distant armour, or glares at hand from Margian steel; or his moonlight glints on a spear, and fades as the wrack races athwart the sky.

It is all the work of an incomparable painter; there is any amount of it in the Parallel Lives;⁴⁰ and, like his portraits and his landscapes,⁴¹ it has an æsthetic value which sets it far in front of his moral reflections. For value depends, in part, on supply; and of this kind of art there is less in literature than there is of ethical disquisition. Moreover, in the Parallel Lives the proportions are reversed, and the volume of Plutarch's painting is very much greater than the volume of Plutarch's moralities. And in addition to volume, there is charm. His pictures have kept their ‘flourishing freshness’ untarnished through the ages; whereas his moral sayings, being sound, have long since been accepted, and, as I said, are grown stale. His morality is ours; but he had an unique opportunity for depicting the politics, the personalities, and the activity of a world which had passed away. A little earlier, and he might have laboured like Thucydides, but only at a part of it. A little later, and much would have perished which he has set down and saved. He paints it as a whole, and on that account is sometimes slighted for a compiler of legends; yet he had the advantage of personal contact with those legends while they were still alive; and again and again, as you read, this contact strikes with a pleasant shock. To illustrate his argument he will refer, by the way, to the statue of Themistocles in the Temple of Artemis; to the effigies of Lucullus at Chæronea; to the buildings of Pericles in their divinely protracted youth. The house of Phocion at Melita, and the ‘cellar’ in which Demosthenes practised his oratory, were ‘whole even to my time.’ The descendants of the soldier who slew Epaminondas are, ‘to this day,’ known and distinguished by the name ‘machœriones.’⁴² On the battlefield of Chæronea ‘there was an olde oke seene in my time which the country men commonly called Alexander's oke, bicause his tent or pavilion was fastened to it.’⁴³ His grandfather Nicarchus had told him how the defeat of Antony relieved his natal city from a requisition for corn.⁴⁴ From his other grandfather, Lamprias, he heard of a physician, his friend, who, ‘being a young man desirous to see things,’ went over Cleopatra's kitchen with one of Antony's cooks; and there, among ‘a world of diversities of meates,’ encountered with the ‘eight wild boares, rosted whole,’ which have passed bodily into Shakespeare. This contact was rarely immediate; but it was personal, and it is therefore quickening. At its touch a dead world lived again for Plutarch, and by his art that dead world lives for us; so that in the Lives, as in no other book, all antiquity, alike in detail and in expanse, lies open and revealed to us, ‘flat as to an eagle's eye.’ We may study it closely, and see it whole; and to do so is to dispossess the mind of many illusions fostered by books of a narrower scope. Juvenal, the satirist, and Petronius, the arbiter of a mode, do not even pretend to show forth the whole of life; yet from their works, and from others of a like purview, men have constructed a fanciful world of unbounded cruelty and immitigable lust. This same disproportion between premise and conclusion runs through the writing of many moderns: just as from the decoration of a single chamber at Pompeii there have been evoked whole cities, each in the image of a honeycomb whose cells are lupanaria. Even so some archæologist of the future might take up an obscene gurgoyle, and transfigure Christianity to its image! This antiquity of cruelty and lust has been evolved for censure by these, and by those for praise; yet if Plutarch be not the most colossal, taking, and ingenious among the world's liars, we cannot choose but hold that it never existed. For, apart from the coil of politics and the clamour and romance of adventure, his book discovers us the religious and the home lives of old-time Italy and Greece; and we find them not dissimilar from our own. We see them, it is true, with the eyes of a kindly and a moderate man. Yet he was no apologist, with a case to plead; and if we may be sure that he was never uncharitable, we may be equally sure that he extenuated nothing. He censures freely conduct which, according to the extreme theory of ancient immorality, should scarce have excited his surprise; and he alludes, by the way, in a score of places, to a loving-kindness, extending even to slaves and animals, of which, according to the same theory, he could have known nothing, since its very existence is denied. The State was more than it is now; but you cannot glean that the Family was less, even in Sparta. Shakespeare took from Plutarch the love of Coriolanus for his mother, and found in it a sufficient motive for his play. But Veturia⁴⁵ is by no means the only beloved mother in the Lives, nor is Coriolanus the only adoring son. Epaminondas thought himself ‘most happy and blessed’ because his father and mother had lived to see the victory he won;⁴⁶ and Sertorius, making overtures for peace, said he had ‘rather be counted the meanest citizen in Rome, than being a banished man to be called Emperor of the world,’ and the ‘chiefest cause … was the tender love he bare unto his mother.’⁴⁷ When Antipater submitted to Alexander certain well-founded accusations against Olympia's misgovernment: ‘“Loe,” said he, “Antipater knoweth not, that one teare of the mothers eye will wipe out tenne thousande such letters.”’⁴⁸ In face of the parting between Cratesiclea and her son Cleomenes, one may doubt if in Sparta itself the love between mother and son was more than dissembled; for, on the eve of his sailing, ‘she took Cleomenes aside into the temple of Neptune and imbracinge and kissinge him; perceivinge that his harte yerned for sorrowe of her departure, she sayed unto him: “O kinge of Lacedæmon, lette no man see for shame when we come out of the temple, that we have wept and dishonoured Sparta.”’ Indeed, the national love of Spartans for all children born to Sparta seems to have been eked out by the fonder and the less indifferent affection of each parent for his own. If in battle Henri-Quatre played Alexander, in the nursery his model was Agesilaus, ‘who loved his children deerely: and would play with them in his home when they were little ones, and ride upon a little cocke horse or a reede, as a horseback.’⁴⁹ Paulus Æmilius being ‘appointed to make warre upon King Perseus, all the people dyd honorably companie him home unto his house, where a little girl (a daughter of his) called Tertia, being yet an infant, came weeping unto her father. He, making muche of her, asked her why she wept. The poore girl answered, colling him about the necke, and kissing him:—“Alas, father, wot you what? our Perseus is dead.” She ment by it a litle whelpe so called, which was her playe fellowe.’ Plutarch had lost his own daughter, and he wrote a letter of consolation to his wife, which Montaigne gave to his wife when she was stricken with the same sorrow: ‘bien marry,’ as he says, ‘de quoy la fortune vous a rendu ce present si propre.’⁵⁰ In the Lives he is ever most tender towards children, acknowledging the mere possibility of their loss for an ever-abiding terror. ‘Nowe,’ he writes in the Solon, ‘we must not arme ourselves with poverty against the grief of losse of goodes; neither with lack of affection against the losse of our friendes; neither with want of mariage against the death of children; but we must be armed with reason against misfortune.’ Over and over again you come upon proof of the love and the compassion children had. At the triumph of the same Æmilius, through three days of such magnificence as Mantegna has displayed, the eyes of Rome were all for Perseus' children: ‘when they sawe the poore little infants, that they knewe not the change of their hard fortune … for the compassion they had of them, almost let the father passe without looking upon him.’ Of Æmilius' own sons, one had died five days before, and the other three days survived, that triumph for which the father had been given four hundred golden diadems by the cities of Greece. But he pronounced their funeral orations himself ‘in face of the whole cittie … not like a discomforted man, but like one rather that dyd comforte his sorrowfull countrymen for his mischance. He told them … he ever feared Fortune, mistrusting her change and inconstancy, and specially in the last warre.’ But Rome had won; and all was well, ‘saving that Perseus yet, conquered as he is, hath this comforte left him: to see his children living, and that the conqueror Æmylius hath lost his.’ This love between children and parents might be expected in any picture of any society; yet it is conspicuous in the Parallel Lives as it is not, I believe, in any reconstruction of the Plutarchian world. Note, too, the passionate devotion between brothers, displayed even by Cato of Utica,⁵¹ to the scandal of other Stoics; and note everywhere the loyal comradeship between husbands and wives. To Plutarch wedlock is so sacred that he is fierce in denouncing a certain political marriage as being ‘cruell and tyrannicall, fitter for Sylla's time, rather than agreable to Pompey's nature.’⁵² Perhaps the commonest view of antique morality is that which accepts a family not unlike the family we know, but at the same time denies the ancients all consideration for their domestic animals and slaves. This tendency, it is thought, is a product of Christianity; and the example of the elder Cato is sometimes quoted in proof of the view. But in Plutarch's Cato, the Roman's habit of selling his worn-out slaves is given for an oddity, for the exceptional practice of an eccentric old man; and Plutarch takes the occasion to expound his own feeling. ‘There is no reason,’ he writes, ‘to use livinge and sensible thinges as we would use an old shooe or a ragge: to cast it out upon the dongehill when we have worn it and it can serve us no longer. For if it were for no respect els but to use us alwayes to humanitie, we must ever showe ourselves kinde and gentle, even in such small poyntes of pitie. And as for me, I coulde never finde in my heart to sell my drawt oxe that hadde ploughed my land a long time, bicause he coulde plowe no longer for age.’ Here we have a higher standard of humanity than obtains in living England, and it is a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that it was peculiar to Plutarch. On the contrary, his book is alive with illustrations of the same consideration for domestic pets and beasts of service. A mule employed in building a temple at Athens, used to ‘come of herselfe to the place of labour’: a docility, ‘which the people liked so well in the poore beast, that they appointed she shoulde be kept whilest she lived, at the charge of the town.’ How many corporations, I wonder, would lay a like load on the rates to-day? In a score of passages is evidence of the belief that ‘gentleness goeth farther than justice.’⁵³ When the Athenians depart from Attica, the most heartrending picture is of the animals they leave deserted on the sea-coast. ‘There was besides a certen pittie that made men's harts to yerne, when they saw the poore doggs, beasts, and cattell ronne up and doune bleating, mouing, and howling out alowde after their masters in token of sorrow when they dyd imbark.’ Xantippus' dog, ‘that swam after them to Salamis and dyed presently,’ is there interred; and ‘they saye at this daye the place called the Doggs Grave is the very place where he was buried.’⁵⁴ With like honour the mares of Cimon, who was fond of racing, are buried at his side. Indeed, the ancients, far from being callous, were, as some would now think, over-sentimental about their horses and dogs. Having no slaves of our own, it is easy for us to denounce slave-owning. But this is noteworthy: that while Plutarch, the ancient, in dealing with the revolt of Spartacus and his fellow-slaves, speaks only of ‘the wickedness of their master,’ and pities their hard lot, North, the modern, dubs them ‘rebellious rascalls,’⁵⁵ without a word of warrant either in the nearer French or in the remoter Greek.

It is, indeed, far easier to pick up points of resemblance than to discover material differences between the social life depicted by Plutarch and our own; and the likeness extends even to those half-shades of feeling and illogical sentiment which often seem peculiar to a generation. To turn from contemporary life to the Parallel Lives is to find everywhere the same natural but inconsequent deference to birth amid democratic institutions;⁵⁶ the same belief that women have recently won a freedom unknown to their grandmothers; the same self-satisfaction in new developments of culture; the same despair over the effects of culture on a pristine morality. There are even irresistible appeals to the good old days. Numa, for instance, ‘enured women to speak little by forbidding them to speak at all except in the presence of their husbands,’ and with such success, that a woman ‘chauncing one daye to pleade her cause in persone before the judges, the Senate hearing of it, did send immediately unto the oracle of Apollo, to know what that did prognosticate to the cittie.’⁵⁷ Here was a beginning; and the rest soon followed. Just as Greek historians had branded the first murderers and parricides by name, even so ‘the Romanes doe note … that the wife of one Pinarius, called Thalœa, was the first which ever brauled or quarrelled with her mother-in-law.’⁵⁸ That was in the days of Tarquin. By Pompey's time—though he, indeed, was fortunate in a wife unspoiled by her many accomplishments—the revolution is complete. His Cornelia ‘could play well on the harpe, was skilfull in musicke and geometrie, and tooke great pleasure also in philosophie, and not vainly without some profit’; yet was she ‘very modest and sober in behaviour, without brauling and foolish curiosity, which commonly young women have, that are indued with such singular giftes.’ Such a woman was the product of the Greek culture, and for that Plutarch has nothing but praise.⁵⁹ It was first introduced, he tells you, after the siege of Syracuse; for Marcellus it was who brought in ‘fineness and curious tables,’ ‘pictures and statues,’ to supplant the existing ‘monuments of victories’: things in themselves ‘not pleasant, but rather fearfull sightes to look upon, farre unfit for feminine eyes.’⁶⁰ In all this there is little that differs from the life we know: you have the same facts and the same reflexions—especially the same reflexions. For our own age is akin to the age of Plutarch, in so far as both are certain centuries in rear of an influx of Hellenic ideas. Those ideas reconquered the West in the fifteenth century; and since this second invasion the results of the first have been repeated in many directions. Certain phases, indeed, of thought and feeling in Plutarch's age are re-echoed to-day still more distinctly than in the world of his Renaissance translators. For in remoteness from the point of first contact with Greek influence, and in the tarnish of disillusion which must inevitably discolour any prolonged development, this century of ours is more nearly allied to Plutarch's than the sixteenth was, with its young hope and unbounded enthusiasm. The older activity reminds you of the times which Plutarch painted; the modern temper, of the times in which he wrote.

But in the frail rope which the mind of man is ever weaving, that he may cling to something in the void of his ignorance, there is one strand which runs through all the Plutarchian centuries; which persists in his own age and on into the age of his early translators; but which in England has been fretted almost through. Nobody can read the Parallel Lives without remarking the signal change which has fallen upon man's attitude towards the supernatural. Everywhere in Plutarch, by way of both narrative and comment, you find a confirmed belief in omens, portents, and ghosts: not a pious opinion, but a conviction bulking huge in everyday thought, and exerting a constant influence on the ordinary conduct of life. Death and disaster, good fortune and victory, never come without forewarning. Before great Cæsar fell there were ‘fires in the element … spirites running up and downe in the nighte’ and ‘solitary birdes to be seene at noone dayes sittinge in the great market-place.’⁶¹ Nor only before a great event, but also after it, occur these sympathetic perturbations in the other world: ‘the night being come, such things fell out, as maye be looked for after so terrible a battle.’⁶² The wood quaked, and a voice cried out of heaven! Allied to and alongside of this belief in an Unseen in touch with the living world at every hour of the day-time and night, you have the solemn practice of obscure rites and the habitual observance of customs half-insignificant. Some of these are graceful; others embarrassing. The divination, for instance, of the Spartan Ephors must often, at least in August and November, have shaken public confidence in the State; for they ‘did sit downe in some open place, and beheld the stars in the element, to see if they saw any starre shoote from one place to another,’ and ‘if they did, then they accused their king.’⁶³ To us, this giving of the grotesque and the terrible in the same breath, without distinction or comment, is strangely incongruous. Sulla's bloody entry into Rome was doubly foreshadowed: there was the antic disposition of certain rats, which first gnawed ‘some juells of golde in a church,’ and then, being trapped by the ‘sexton,’ ate up their young; and again, ‘when there was no cloude to be seen in the element at all, men heard such a sharp sound of a trompet, as they were almost out of their wits at so great a noise.’⁶⁴ No scientific explanation, even if one were forthcoming, could suffice to lull suspicion in a pious mind. Æmilius understood as well as any the cause of the moon's eclipse: ‘nevertheless, he being a godly devout man, so soon as he perceyved the moone had recovered her former brightness againe, he sacrificed eleven calves.’⁶⁵ To add to the inconvenience of this habit of mind, there were more unlucky days in the year than holidays in the mediæval calendar. It was such a day that marred the prospect of Alcibiades' return: for ‘there were some that misliked very much the time of his landing: saying it was very unluckie and unfortunate. For the very day of his returne, fell out by chaunce on the feast which they call Plynteria, as you would saye, the washing day.’⁶⁶ Such feasts, with their half-meaningless customs, accompanied the belief in portents and ghosts and the ordinary forms of ritual, being but another fruit of the same intellectual habit. Some of them seem absurd anachronisms in the Rome of Julius Cæsar. At the Lupercal, for instance, even in Cæsar's day, as every one knows from Shakespeare, young men of good family still ran naked through the streets, touching brides at the request of their husbands.⁶⁷ Again, on the feast of the goddess Matuta, ‘they cause a chamber mayde to enter into her temple, and there they boxe her about the eares. Then they put her out of the temple, and do embrace their brothers' children rather than their own.’⁶⁸ There is no end to these customs: customs which are as it were costumes of the mind, partly devised to cover its nakedness, and partly expressed in fancy. Plutarch tries sometimes to explain their origin; but he can only hazard a guess. Nobody remembers what they mean. They are, rather, a picturesque means of asserting that there really is an undercurrent of meaning in the world.

Beyond and above these mummeries, now so strange, in a loftier range of Plutarch's thought is much that is familiar and near. Of some miracles he writes almost as an apologist. It is said that ‘images … have been heard to sighe: that they have turned: and that they have made certen signes with their eyes.’ These reports ‘are not,’ he adds, ‘incredible, nor lightly to be condemned. But for such matters it is daungerous to give too much credit to them, as also to discredit them too much, by reason of the weaknes of man's nature, which hath no certen boundes, nor can rule itself, but ronneth sometimes to vanitie and superstition, and otherwhile also despiseth and condemneth holy and divine matters.’⁶⁹ On such points of belief, as on the immediate inspiration of individuals, ‘the waye is open and large’:⁷⁰ each must decide for himself, remembering that religion is the mean between superstition and impiety. On the other hand, never once does Plutarch admit a doubt of the Divine Government of the world. He approves his Alexander's saying: ‘that God generally was father to all mortall men.’⁷¹ And in a magnificent passage of North's English which might almost have come out of the book of Common Prayer, he upholds the view of Pythagoras: ‘who thought that God was neither sensible nor mortall, but invisible, incorruptible and only intelligible.’⁷²

III

In substance, then, the book stands alone. Its good fortune has been also unexampled. By a chance this singular image of the ancient world has been happy beyond others in the manner of its transmission to our time. To quote a Quarterly Reviewer:⁷³ ‘There is no other case of an ancient writer—whether Greek or Latin—becoming as well known in translations as he was in the classical world, or as great modern writers are in the modern one’; and for this chance we have to thank one man, Jaques Amyot. But for his version we should have received none from North; and without these two, Plutarch must have remained sealed to all but Greek scholars. For the Daciers and the Langhornes could never have conquered in right of their own impoverished prose. They palmed it off on a public still dazzled by the fame wherewith their forerunners had illuminated the Lives; and when these were ousted from recollection, their own fate became a simple matter of time.

The son of a butcher,⁷⁴ or a draper,⁷⁵ Jaques Amyot was born at Melun in 1513, and was sent as a boy by his parents to study at Paris. You find him there at fifteen, at Cardinal Lemoine's college, and two years later following the lectures of Thusan and Danès. For the University, still hide-bound in scholastic philosophy, was nothing to his purpose of mastering Greek. It was hard in those years, even for the rich, to find books in Greek character,⁷⁶ and Amyot must live on the loaves his mother sent him by the river barges, and wait for a pittance on his fellow-students. Yet he toiled on with romantic enthusiasm, reading by the firelight for lack of candles; till at last he knew all they could teach him, and left Paris to become a tutor at Bourges. There, thanks to Marguerite de Navarre,⁷⁷ he obtained a chair in the University, whence he lectured twice a day on Greek and Latin letters during twelve years. It was in these years that he began his great work as a translator: completing in all probability the Æthiopian History,⁷⁸ and the more famous Daphnis and Chloe.⁷⁹ But, at the instance of Marguerite's brother, François i., he also began the Lives, receiving by way of incentive the Abbacy of Bellozane;⁸⁰ and to prosecute this purpose, soon after the king's death, he made a scholar's pilgrimage to Italy. In the Library of St. Mark at Venice he rediscovered the Lives of Diodorus Siculus;⁸¹ in the Library of the Vatican a more perfect MS. of the Æthiopian History. But search as he might during his two years' stay at Rome, he could never recover the missing lives of Plutarch. He laboured on the text, but those which l'injurie du temps nous avoit enviées,⁸² were gone past retrieving. On his return the scholar became a courtier, in the castles of the Loire, and something of a diplomat; for he acted as the emissary of Henri ii. at the Council of Trent, playing an inconspicuous part grossly exaggerated by De Thou. In 1554 he was appointed tutor to the young princes who were to rule as Charles ix. and Henri iii. In 1559 he published the Lives; the next year, on the accession of his elder pupil, he was made Grand Almoner of France; and in 1570 he became Bishop of Auxerre. In 1572 he published the Morals; but this book, like the Franciade, published in the same year, fell comparatively dead. The halcyon days of scholars and poets ended with the St. Bartholomew; and thenceforward the darkness deepened over these two and all the brilliant company which had gathered round Catherine and Diane de Poictiers. In 1588 the full fury of the Catholic League fell upon Amyot, for standing by his king after the murder of the Guise. His diocese revolted at the instigation of Claude Trahy, a truculent monk; and the last works he published are his Apology and Griefs des Plaintes. In August 1589 he wrote to the Duc de Nivernais: ‘Je suis le plus affligé, destruit et ruiné pauvre prebstre qui, comme je crois, soit en France’; in 1591 he was divested of his dignities;⁸³ and in 1593 he died. His long life reflects the changing features of his time. In youth he was a scholar accused of scepticism, in old age a divine attacked for heresy, and for some pleasant years between, a courtier pacing with poets and painters the long galleries of Amboise and Chenonceaux: as we may think, well within earshot of those wide bay-windows where the daughters of France ‘entourées de leurs gouvernantes et filles d'honneur, s'edifioient grandement aux beaux dits des Grecs et des Romains, rememoriez par le doulx Plutarchus.’⁸⁴

He was, then, a scholar touched with the wonder of a time which saw, as in Angelo's Last Judgment, the great works of antiquity lifting their limbs from the entombing dust of oblivion; and he was a courtier behind the scenes in a great age of political adventure. Was he also an accurate translator? According to De Thou, he rendered his original ‘majore elegantiâ quam fide’; according to Meziriac,⁸⁵ he was guilty of two thousand blunders.⁸⁶ The verdict was agreeable to the presumption of the seventeenth century, and was, of course, confirmed by the eighteenth; but it has been revised. Given the impossibility of finding single equivalents in the young speech of the Renaissance, for the literary and philosophic connotations of a language laboured during six hundred years; and given the practice of choosing without comment the most plausible sense of a corrupted passage, the better opinion seems to be that Amyot lost little in truth, and gained everything in charm. ‘It is surprising,’ says Mr. Long,⁸⁷ and his word shall be the last, ‘to find how correct this old French translation generally is.’ The question of style is of deeper importance. Upon this Ste.-Beuve acutely remarks⁸⁸ that the subtlety of Plutarch, as of Augustine, and the artless good-nature of Amyot belong each to its age; and, further, are more apparent to us than real in their authors. We may say, indeed, without extravagance, that the youth of Amyot's style, modifying the age of Plutarch's, achieves a mean in full and natural harmony with Plutarch's matter. In Amyot's own opinion, so great a work must appeal to all men of judgment ‘en quelque style qu'il soit mis, pourveu qu'il s'entende’;⁸⁹ yet his preoccupation on this point was punctilious. He found in Plutarch a ‘scabreuse aspérité’—‘épineuse et ferrée’ are Montaigne's epithets—yet set himself ‘à représenter aucunement et à adumbrer la forme de style et manière de parler d'iceluy’:⁹⁰ apologising to any who on that account should find his language less ‘coulant’ than of yore. But Amyot was no pedant; he would render his original, not ape him; he would write French, and not rack it. He borrowed at need from Greek and Italian, but he was loyal to his own tongue. ‘Nous prendrons,’ said he—and the canon is unimpeachable—‘les mots qui sont les plus propres pour signifier la chose dont nous voulons parler, ceux qui nous sembleront plus doux, qui sonneront le mieux à l'oreille, qui seront coutumièrement en la bouche des bien parlants, qui seront bons françois et non étrangers.’ To render late Greek into early French is not easy; so he takes his time. Not a word is there save to further his conquest of Plutarch's meaning; but all his words are marshalled in open order, and they pace at leisure. For his own great reward Montaigne wrote: ‘Je donne la palme avecque raison, ce me semble, a Jaques Amyot, sur tous nos escripvains François’; and he remains the earliest classic accepted by the French Academy. But for our delight he found Plutarch a language which could be translated into Elizabethan English.

If Amyot was the right man for Plutarch, North was the right man for Amyot. He was born the second and youngest son of Edward, first Baron North, about the year 1535, and educated, in all probability, at Peterhouse, Cambridge.⁹¹ His father was one of those remarkable men of law who, through all the ranging political and religious vicissitudes under Henry vii., Henry viii., Edward vi., Queen Jane, Mary, and Elizabeth—so disastrous to the older nobility—ever contrived to make terms with the winning side; until, dying in 1564, a peer of the realm and Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, he was buried in Kirtling Church, where his monumental inscription may still be read in the chancel. His son Thomas was also entered a student at Lincoln's Inn (1557), but he soon preferred letters before law. He was generally, Leicester wrote to Burghley, ‘a very honest gentleman, and hath many good things in him, which are drowned only by poverty.’ In particular, we are told by his great-nephew, the fourth Baron, he was ‘a man of courage,’ and in the days of the Armada we find him taking command, as Captain, of three hundred men of Ely. Fourteen years before (in 1574) he had accompanied his brother Roger, the second Baron, in his Embassy-Extraordinary to Henri iii.: a mission of interest to us, as it cannot but have encountered him with Amyot, and may have determined him to translate the Lives. He was already an author. In December 1557 he had published, with a dedication to Queen Mary, his translation of Guevara's Libro Aureo,⁹² a Spanish adaptation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and in 1570 The Morall Philosophie of Doni … ‘a worke first compiled in the Indian tongue.’⁹³ For the rest, his immortal service to English letters brought him little wealth, but much consideration from his neighbours, his kinsmen, and his sovereign. In 1568 he was presented with the freedom of the city of Cambridge. In 1576 his brother gave him the ‘lease of a house and household stuff.’ He was knighted about 1591; he received the Commission of the Peace in Cambridgeshire in 1592; in 1601 he got a pension of £40 from the Queen, duly acknowledged in his dedication of the lives added to the Plutarch of 1603. He died, it is likely, before this edition saw the light: a valiant and courteous gentleman, and the earliest master of great English prose.

He also thought the Lives a book ‘meete to be set forth in English.’⁹⁴ Truly: but in what English? He writes of a Muse ‘called Tacita,⁹⁵ as ye would saye, ladye Silence.’ Should we? Turning to a modern translation, I find ‘Tacita, which means silent or dumb.’ The glory has clearly departed: but before seeking it again in North's unrivalled language, I must ask of him, as I have asked of Amyot, Was he an accurate translator? I do not believe there are a score of passages throughout his 1175 folio pages⁹⁶ in which he impairs the sense of his original. And most of these are the merest slips, arising from the necessity imposed on him of breaking up Amyot's prolonged periods, and his subsequent failure in the attribution of relatives and qualifications. They are not of the slightest consequence, if the reader, on finding an obscurity, will rely on the general sense of the passage rather than on the rules of syntax; and of such obscurities I will boldly say that there are not ten in the whole book. Very rarely he mistakes a word—as ‘real’ for ‘royal’—and very rarely a phrase. For instance, in the Pericles he writes: ‘At the beginning there was but a little secret grudge only between these two factions, as an artificial flower set in the blade of a sworde,’ which stands for ‘comme une feuille superficielle en une lame de fer.’ In the Solon he writes: ‘his familier friendes above all rebuked him, saying he was to be accompted no better than a beast,’ for ‘qu'il seroit bien beste.’ Some of his blunders lend power to Amyot and Plutarch both: as in that fine passage of the Publicola, wherein the conspirators' ‘great and horrible othe, drinking the blood of a man and shaking hands in his bowels,’ stands for ‘touchant des mains aux entrailles.’ There is one such error of unique interest. It stands in Shakespeare that

          ‘in his mantle muffling up his face,
Even at the base of Pompey's statua,
Which all the while ran blood, great Cæsar fell’;

and we read in North, ‘against the base, whereupon Pompey's image stoode, which ranne all of a goare bloude’; but Amyot simply writes, ‘qui en fust toute ensanglantée.’ The blunder has enriched the world: that is, if it was truly a blunder, and not a touch of genius. For North will sometimes, though very rarely of set purpose, magnify with a word, or transfigure a sentence. ‘Le deluge,’ for example, is always ‘Noe's flood’; and in one celebrated passage he bowdlerises without shame, turning Flora's parting caress to Pompey into a ‘sweete quippe or pleasant taunte.’⁹⁷ Such are the discrepancies which can by any stretch be called blunders; and the sum of them is insignificant in a work which echoes its original not only in sense but also in rhythm and form. North had the Greek text, or perhaps a Latin translation, before him. In the Sertorius he speaks of ‘Gaule Narbonensis,’ with nothing but ‘Languedoc’ in Amyot; in the Pompey he gives the Greek, unquoted by Amyot, for ‘let the dye be cast’; in dealing with Demosthenes' quinsy, he attempts an awkward pun, which Amyot has disdained; and in the Cicero he gives in Greek character the original for Latin terms of philosophy, whereas Amyot does not. These are the only indications I have found of his having looked beyond the French. But on Amyot he set a grip which had its bearing on the development of Tudor prose. It may even be that, in tracing this development, we have looked too exclusively to Italian, Spanish, and classical sources. Sidney read North's book; Shakespeare rifled it; and seven editions⁹⁸ were published, within the hundred years which saw the new birth of English prose and its glorious fulfilment. In acknowledging our debt, have we not unduly neglected the Bishop of Auxerre? Sentence for sentence and rhythm for rhythm, in all the great passages North's style is essentially Amyot's.⁹⁹ There are differences, of course, which catch the eye, and have, therefore, as I think, attracted undue attention, the more naturally since they are all in North's favour. His vigorous diction puts stuff into the text: he stitches it with sturdy locutions, he tags it with Elizabethan braveries. But the woof and the design are still Amyot's; and the two versions may be studied most conveniently abreast.

In neither writer is the verse of any account. Indeed, when North comes to an incident of the Gymnopaedia—‘the which Sophocles doth easily declare by these verses:

‘The song which you shall sing shall be the sonnet sayde
By Hermony lusty lasse, that strong and sturdy mayde;
Which trust her peticote about her middle short
And set to show her naked hippes in frank and friendly sort’—

you feel that the reference to Sophocles is not only remote but also grotesque. It is very different with their prose. And first, is North's version—the translation of a translation—by much removed from Plutarch? In a sense, yes. It is even truer of North than of Amyot, that he offers Plutarch neither to philosophers nor to grammarians, but to all who would understand life and human nature.¹⁰⁰ But for these, and for all lovers of language, Plutarch loses little in Amyot, saving in the matter of literary allusion; and Amyot loses nothing in North, save for the presence of a score of whims and obscurities. On the other hand, we recapture in North an English equivalent for those ‘gasconisms’ which Montaigne retained in French, but which Amyot rejected from it. The Plutarchian hues are never lost—they are but doubly refracted; and by each refraction they are broadened in surface and deepened in tone. The sunlight of his sense is sometimes subdued by a light mist, or is caught in the fantastic outline of a little cloud. But the general effect is touched with a deeper solemnity and a more splendid iridescence; even where the vapours lie thickest, the red rays throb through.

But the proof of the pudding is the eating. Let us take a passage at random, and compare the sixteenth century renderings with the cold perversions of a later age. For example, Amyot writes¹⁰¹ that Pythagoras ‘apprivoisa une aigle, qu'il feit descendre et venir a luy par certaines voix, ainsi comme elle volait en l'air dessus sa teste’; in North this eagle is ‘so tame and gentle, that she would stoupe, and come down to him by certaine voyaces, as she flewe in the ayer over his head’; while in an accurate modern Pythagoras merely ‘tamed an eagle and made it alight on him.’ The earlier creature flies like a bird of Jove, but the later comes down like a brick. The Langhornes' eagle is still more precipitate, their Pythagoras still more peremptory. ‘That philosopher,’ as they naturally call the Greek, ‘had so far tamed an eagle that by pronouncing certain words he could stop it in its flight, or bring it down.’ Perhaps I may finish at once with the Langhornes by referring to their description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus. They open that pageant, made glorious for ever by Amyot, North, and Shakespeare, in these terms: ‘Though she had received many pressing letters of invitation from Antony and his friends, … she by no means took the most expeditious mode of travelling.’ Thus the Langhornes; and they denounce the translation called Dryden's¹⁰² for ‘tame and tedious, without elegance, spirit, or precision’! Now, it was a colossal impertinence to put out the Lives among the Greeklings of Grub Street, in order to ‘complete the whole in a year’; but it must be noted that, after North's, this¹⁰³ is still the only version that can be read without impatience. Dryden's hacks were not artists, but neither were they prigs: the vocabulary was not yet a charnel of decayed metaphor; and if they missed the rapture of sixteenth-century rhythm, they had not bleached the colour, carded the texture, and ironed the surface of their language to the well-glazed insignificance of the later eighteenth century. Their Plutarch is no longer wrapped in the royal robes of Amyot and North; but he is spared the cheap though formal tailoring of Dacier and the Langhornes. In our own time there have been translations by scholars: they are useful as cribs, but they do not pretend to charm. Here, for instance, is North's funeral of Philopœmen: ‘The souldiers were all crowned with garlandes of Laurell in token of victory, not withstanding the teares ranne downe their cheekes in token of sorrowe, and they led their enemies prisoners shackled and chained. The funeral pot in which were Philipœmenes ashes, was so covered with garlands of flowers, nosegaies, and laces that it could scant be seene or discerned.’ And here is the crib: ‘There one might see men crowned with garlands but weeping at the same time, and leading along his enemies in chains. The urn itself, which was scarcely to be seen for the garlands and ribbons with which it was covered,’ etc. Here, too, is North's Demetrius: ‘He took pleasure of Lamia, as a man would have delight to heare one tell tales, when he hath nothing else to doe, or is desirous to sleep: but indeede when he was to make any preparation for warre, he had not then ivey at his dart's end, nor had his helmet perfumed, nor came not out of ladies closets, pricked and princt to go to battell: but he let all dauncing and sporting alone, and became as the poet Euripides saith,

‘The souldier of Mars, cruell and bloodie.’

And here is the crib: ‘He only dedicated the superfluity of his leisure to enjoyment, and used his Lamia, like the mythical nightmare, only when he was half asleep or at play. When he was preparing for war, no ivy wreathed his spear, no perfume scented his helmet, nor did he go from his bedchamber to battle covered with finery.’ ‘Dedicated the superfluity of his leisure!’ At such a jewel the Langhornes must have turned in envy in their graves! But, apart from style, modern scholars have a fetish which they worship to the ruin of any literary claim. Amyot and North have been ridiculed for writing, in accordance with their method, of nuns and churches, and not of vestals and temples. Yet the opposite extreme is far more fatiguing. Where is the sense of putting ‘chalkaspides’ in the text and ‘soldiers who had shields of brass’ in the notes? Is it not really less distracting to read, as in North, of soldiers ‘marching with their copper targets’? So, too, with the Parthian kettle-drums. It is an injury to write ‘hollow instruments’ in so splendid a passage; and an insult to add in a note ‘the context seems to show that a drum is meant.’ Of course! And ‘kettle-drums’ is a perfect equivalent for ῥόπτρα, ‘made of skin, and hollow, which they stretch round brass sounders.’ But if these things are done in England, you may know what to expect of Germany. In the picture of Cato's suicide there is one supreme touch, rendered by Plutarch ἤδη δ' ὄρνιθεs eδον; by Amyot les petits oyseaux commençoient desja à chanter; by North, the little birds began to chirpe. But Kaltwasser turns the little birds into crowing cocks; and maintains his position by a learned argument. It was still, says he, in the night, and other fowls are silent until dawn.¹⁰⁴ If the style of the eighteenth century be tedious, the scholarship of the nineteenth is intolerable. The truth is that in the sixteenth alone could the Lives be fitly translated. For there were passages, as of the arming of Greece, in the Philopœmen, which could only be rendered in an age still accustomed to armour. Any modern rendering, be it by writer or by don, must needs be archaistically mediæval or pedantically antique.

Turning, then, to Amyot and North, the strangest thing to note, and the most important, is that the English, although without a touch of foreign idiom, is modelled closely upon the French. Some explanation of this similarity in form may be found in the nature of the matter. The narration, as opposed to the analysis, of action; the propounding, as opposed to the proof, of philosophy—these are readily conveyed from one language into another, and Joshua and Ecclesiastes are good reading in most versions of the Bible. But North is closer to Amyot than any two versions of the Bible are to each other. The French runs into the English five times out of six, and in all the great passages, not only word for word but almost cadence for cadence. There is a trick of redundancy in Tudor prose that makes for emphasis and melody. We account it English, and find it abounding in our Bible. It is wholly alien from modern French prose—wholly alien, too, from French prose of the seventeenth century. Indeed, I would go further, and say that it is largely characteristic of Amyot the writer, and not of the age in which he wrote. You do not find it, for instance, in the prose of Joachim du Bellay.¹⁰⁵ But now take North's account of the execution before Brutus of his two eldest sons;¹⁰⁶ ‘which,’ you read, ‘was such a pitieful sight to all people, that they could not find it in their hearts to beholde it, but turned themselves another waye, bicause they would not see it.’ That effective repetition is word for word in the French: ‘qu'ilz n'avoient pas le cueur de les regarder, ains se tournoient d'un austre costé pour n'en rien veoir.’ But, apart from redundancy, the closeness is at all times remarkable. Consider the phrase: ‘but to go on quietly and joyfully at the sound of these pipes to hazard themselves even to death.’¹⁰⁷ You would swear it original, but here is the French: ‘ains aller posement et joyeusement au son des instruments, se hazarder au peril de la mort.’ The same effect is produced by the same rhythm. Or, take the burial of unchaste vestals:¹⁰⁸ when the muffled litter passes, the people ‘follow it mourningly with heavy looks and speake never a word’; ‘avec une chère basse, et morne sans mot dire’; and so on, in identical rhythm, to the end of that magnificent passage. I will give one longer example, from the return of Alcibiades. You read in North: ‘Those that could come near him dyd welcome and imbrace him: but all the people wholly followed him: And some that came to him put garlands of flowers upon his head: and those that could not come neare him, sawe him afarre off, and the olde folkes dyd poynte him out to the younger sorte.’ And in Amyot: ‘Ceulx qui en pouvoient approcher le saluoient et l'embrassoient, mais tous l'accompagnoient; et y en avoient aucuns qui s'approchans de luy, luy mettoient des chappeaux de fleurs sur la teste et ceulx qui n'en pouvoient approcher, le regardoient de loing, et les vieux le monstroient aux jeunes.’ Here is the very manner of the Authorised Version: flowing but not prolix, full but not turgid. Is it, then, fanciful to suggest that Amyot's style, evolved from the inherent difficulty of his task, was accepted by North for its beauty, and used by the translators of the Bible for its fitness to an undertaking hard for similar reasons and in a similar way? Amyot piles up his epithets, and links one varied cadence to another: yet his volume is not of extravagant utterance, but of extreme research. He was endeavouring to render late Greek into French of the Renaissance; and so he sought for perfect expression not—as to-day—in one word but in the resultant of many. And this very volume of utterance, however legitimate, imposed the necessity of rhythm. His innumerable words, if they were not to weary, must be strung on a wire of undulating gold. North copied this cadence, and gave a storehouse of expression to the writers of his time. It seems to me, therefore, not rash to trace, through North, to Amyot one rivulet of the many that fell into the mighty stream of rhythm flowing through the classic version of the English Bible.

But North and Amyot are not men of one trick: they can be terse and antithetical when they will. You read that Themistocles advanced the honour of the Athenians, making them ‘to overcome their enemies by force, and their friends and allies with liberality’; in Amyot: ‘Vaincre leurs ennemies en prouesse, et leurs alliez et amis en bonté’! North can play this tune as well as any: e.g., ‘If they,’ Plutarch's heroes, ‘have done this for heathen Kings, what should we doe for Christian Princes? If they have done this for glorye, what shoulde we doe for religion? If they have done this without hope of heaven, what should we doe that looke for immortalitie?’¹⁰⁹ But he can play other tunes too. Much is now written of the development of the sentence; and no doubt since the decadence advances have been made. Yet, in the main, they are to recover a territory wilfully abandoned. In North and Amyot there are sentences of infinite device—sentences numerous and harmonic beyond the dreams of Addison and Swift. I will give some examples. Amyot: ‘S'éblouissant à regarder une telle splendeur, et se perdant à sonder un tel abysme.’ That is fine enough, but North beats it: ‘Dazeled at the beholding of such brightnesse, and confounded at the gaging of so bottomlesse a deepe.’¹¹⁰ Amyot: ‘Ne plus ne moins que si c'eust esté quelque doulce haleine d'un vent salubre et gracieu qui leur eust soufflé du costé de Rome pour les rafreshir.’ And North: ‘As if some gentle ayer had breathed on them by some gracious and healthfull wind, blowen from Rome to refresh them.’¹¹¹ No translation could be closer; yet in the first example North's English is stronger than the French, and in the second it flows, like the air, with a more ineffable ease. Take, again, the account of the miracle witnessed during the battle of Salamis. Here is Amyot: ‘que l'on ouit une haulte voix et grande clameur par toute la plaine Thrasiene jusques à la mer, comme s'il y eust eu grand nombre d'hommes qui ensemble eussent à haulte voix chanté le sacre cantique de Iacchus, et sembloit que de la multitude de ceulx qui chantoient il se levast petit à petit une nuée en l'air, laquelle partant de la terre venoit à fondre et tumber sur les galeres en la mer.’ And here is North: ‘that a lowde voyce was heard through all the plaine of Thriasia unto the sea, as if there had bene a number of men together, that had songe out alowde, the holy songe of Iacchus. And it seemed by litle and litle that there rose a clowde in the ayer from those which sange: that left the land, and came and lighted on the gallyes in the sea.’ I have put into italics so much of Amyot as North renders word for word. His fidelity is beyond praise; but the combination of such fidelity with perfect and musical expression is no less than a miracle of artistry. North, in this passage as elsewhere, not only writes more beautiful English: he gives, also, a description of greater completeness and clarity than you will find in any later version of Plutarch. The elemental drama transfigures his prose; but every fact is realised, every sensuous impression is set down, and set down in its order. So much may be said, too, of Amyot; but in his rendering you are aware of the words and the construction—in fact, of the author. In North's there is but the pageant of the sky; there is never a restless sound to disturb the illusion; the cadence is sublimated of all save a delicate alliteration, tracing its airy rhythm to the ear. The work is full of such effects, some of simple melody, and others of more than contrapuntal involution; for he commands his English as a skilled organist his organ, knowing the multitude of its resources, and drawing at need upon them all. Listen to his rendering of Pericles' sorrow for his son: ‘Neither saw they him weepe at any time nor mourne at the funeralles of any of his kinsmen or friendes, but at the death of Paralus, his younger and lawful begotten sonne: for, the losse of him alone dyd only melt his harte. Yet he dyd strive to showe his naturall constancie, and to keepe his accustomed modestie. But as he woulde have put a garland of flowers upon his head, sorrowe dyd so pierce his harte when he sawe his face, that then he burst out in teares and cryed amaine; which they never saw him doe before all the dayes of his life.’ Yes, the pathos of the earth is within his compass; but he can also attain to the sublimity of heaven: ‘The everlasting seate, which trembleth not, and is not driven nor moved with windes, neither is darkened with clowdes, but is allwayes bright and cleare, and at all times shyning with a pure bright light, as being the only habitation and mansion place of the eternall God, only happy and immortall.’¹¹²

These two passages from the last movement of the Pericles can only be spoken of in North's own language: they are ‘as stoppes and soundes of the soul played upon with the fine fingered hand of a conning master.’¹¹³ Yet they are modelled on Amyot's French. It seems scarce credible; and indeed, if the mould be the same, the metal has been transmuted. You feel that much has been added to the form so faithfully followed; that you are listening to an English master of essentially English prose. For these passages are in the tradition of our tongue: the first gives an echo of Malory's stately pathos, and the second an earnest of our Apocalypse. In building up these palaces of music North has followed the lines of Amyot's construction; but his melody in the first is sweeter, his harmony in the second peals out with a loftier rapture.

I have dwelt upon the close relation of North's style to Amyot's, because it is the rule, and because it has a bearing on the development of Tudor prose. This rule of likeness seems to me worthier of note than any exceptions; both for the strangeness and the importance. But, of course, there are exceptions: there are traits, of attitude and of expression, personal to North the man and the writer. He has a national leaning towards the sturdy and the bluff. In a sonnet written some twenty years earlier, Du Bellay, giving every nation a particular epithet, labels our forefathers for ‘les Anglais mutins.’ The epithet is chosen by an enemy; but there was ever in the English temper, above all, in the roaring days of great Elizabeth, a certain jovial frowardness, by far removed both from impertinence and from bluster, which inclined us, as we should put it, to stand no nonsense from anybody. This national characteristic is strongly marked in North. For him Spartacus and his slaves are ‘rebellious rascals.’ When Themistocles boasts of being able to make a small city great, though he cannot, indeed, tune a viol or play of the psalterion, Amyot calls his words ‘un peu haultaines et odieuses’: they are repugnant to the cultured prelate, and he gives a full equivalent for the censure of Plutarch, the cultured Greek.¹¹⁴ But North will not away with this censure of a bluff retort: having his bias, he deliberately betrays his original, making Themistocles answer ‘with great and stout words.’ There is also in North's character a strain of kindness, almost of softness, towards women and children and the pathetic side of life. In the wonderful passage describing the living burial of unchaste vestals,¹¹⁵ where almost every other word is literally translated, North turns ‘la criminelle’ into ‘the seely offendour’: as it were with a gracious reminiscence of Chaucer's ‘ne me ne list this seely woman chide.’ And in the Solon, where a quaint injunction is given for preserving love in wedlock, Amyot writes that so courteous a custom, being observed by a husband towards his wife, ‘garde que les courages et vouluntez ne s'alienent de tout poinct les uns des autres.’ (The phrase is rendered in a modern version ‘preventing their leading to actual quarrel.’) But North lifts the matter above the level of laughter or puritanical reproach: it ‘keepeth,’ as he writes, ‘love and good will waking, that it die not utterly between them.’ The beauty and gentleness of these words, in so strange a context, are, you feel, inspired by chivalry and a deep reverence for women. These two strains in North's character find vent in his expression; but they never lead him far from the French. There is an insistence, but no more, on all things gentle and brave; and this insistence goes but to further a tendency already in Amyot. For in that age the language of gentlemen received a like impress in both countries from their common standards of courage and courtesy; and among gentlemen, Amyot and North seem to have been drawn yet closer to each other by a common kinship with the brave and gentle soul of Plutarch. These two qualities which are notable in Plutarch and Amyot in all such passages, lead in North to a distinct exaggeration of phrase, though ever in the direction of their true intent. He makes grim things grimmer, and sweet things more sweet. So that the double translation from the Greek gives the effect of a series of contours traced the one above the other, and ever increasing the curve of the lowest outline.

But North, being no sentimentalist, finds occasion for fifty stout words against one soft saying. The stark vigour of his diction is, indeed, its most particular sign. The profit to the Greeks of a preliminary fight before Salamis is thus declared by Amyot: it proved ‘que la grande multitude des vaisseaux, ny la pompe et magnificence des parements d'iceulx, ny les cris superbes et chants de victoire des Barbares, ne servent de rien à l'encontre de ceulx qui ont le cueur de joindre de près, et combattre à coups de main leur ennemy, et qu'il ne fault point faire compte de tout cela, ains aller droit affronter les hommes et s'attacher hardiment à eulx.’ North follows closely for a time, but in the last sentence he lets out his language to the needs of a maxim so pertinent to a countryman of Drake. The Greeks saw, says he, ‘that it was not the great multitude of shippes, nor the pomp and sumptuous setting out of the same, nor the prowde barbarous showts and songes of victory that could stand them to purpose, against noble hartes and valliant minded souldiers, that durst grapple with them, and come to hand strokes with their enemies: and that they should make no reckoning of all that bravery and bragges, but should sticke to it like men, and laye it on the jacks of them.’ The knight who was to captain his three hundred men in the Armada year, has the pull here over the bishop; and on occasion he has always such language at command. ‘Les autres qui estoient demourez à Rome’ instead of marching to the war¹¹⁶ are ‘the home-tarriers and house-doves’: upbraided elsewhere¹¹⁷ because they ‘never went from the smoke of the chimney nor carried away any blowes in the field.’ When Philopœmen, wounded with a dart that ‘pierced both thighes through and through, that the iron was seene on either side,’ saw ‘the fight terrible,’ and that it ‘woulde soon be ended,’ you read in Amyot ‘qu'il perdoit patience de despit,’ but in North that ‘it spited him to the guttes, he would so faine have bene among them.’ The phrase is born of sympathy and conviction. North, too, has a fine impatience of fools. Hannibal, discovering the error of his guides, ‘les feit pendre’ in Amyot; in North he ‘roundely trussed them up and honge them by the neckes.’¹¹⁸ And he is not sparing in his censure of ill-livers. Phœa, you read in the Theseus, ‘was surnamed a sowe for her beastly brutishe behaviour, and wicked life.’ He can be choleric as well as kindly, and never minces his words.

Apart from those expressions which spring from the idiosyncrasy of his temperament, North's style shares to the full in the general glory of Elizabethan prose. You read of ‘fretised seelings,’¹¹⁹ of words that ‘dulce and soften the hardened harts of the multitude’;¹²⁰ of the Athenians ‘being set on a jolitie to see themselves strong.’ Heads are ‘passhed in peces,’ and men ‘ashamed to cast their honour at their heeles’ (Amyot: ‘d'abandonner leur gloire’). Themistocles' father shows him the ‘shipwracks and ribbes (Amyot: ‘les corps’) of olde gallyes cast here and there.’ You have, ‘pluck out of his head the worm of ambition’¹²¹ for ‘oster de sa fantasie l'ambition’; and Cæsar on the night before his death hears Calpurnia, ‘being fast asleep, weepe and sigh, and put forth many fumbling lamentable speeches.’ But in particular, North is richer than even his immediate followers in homespun images and proverbial locutions. Men who succeed, ‘bear the bell’;¹²² ‘tenter la fortune le premier’ is ‘to breake the ise of this enterprise.’¹²³ Coriolanus by his pride ‘stirred coales emong the people.’ The Spartans who thwarted Themistocles ‘dyd sit on his skirtes’; and the Athenians fear Pericles because in voice and manner ‘he was Pisistratus up and downe.’ The Veians let fall their ‘peacockes bravery’;¹²⁴ and a man when pleased is ‘as merry as a pye.’¹²⁵ Raw recruits are ‘fresh-water souldiers.’ A turncoat carries ‘two faces in one hoode’;¹²⁶ and the Carthaginians, being outwitted, ‘are ready to eate their fingers for spyte.’ The last locution occurs also in North's Morall Philosophie of 1570: he habitually used such expressions, and yet others which are truly proverbs, common to many languages. For instance, he writes in the Camillus, ‘these words made Brennus mad as a March Hare that out went his blade’; in Cato Utican ‘to set all at six and seven’; in Solon ‘so sweete it is to rule the roste’; in Pelopidas ‘to hold their noses to the gryndstone’; in Cicero, with even greater incongruity, of his wife Terentia ‘wearing her husbandes breeches.’ In the Alcibiades, the Athenians ‘upon his persuasion, built castles in the ayer’; and this last has been referred to Sidney's Apologie; but the first known edition of the Apologie is dated 1595, and it is supposed to have been written about 1581; North has it not only in the Lives (1579), but in his Morall Philosophie of 1570.¹²⁷ To North, too, we may perhaps attribute some of the popularity in England of engaging jingles. ‘Pritle pratle’ and ‘topsie turvie’ occur both in the Lives and the Morall Philosophie. And in the Lives you have also ‘spicke and spanne newe’;¹²⁸ with ‘hurly burly’ and ‘pel mel,’ adopted by Shakespeare in Macbeth and Richard III. Since North takes the last from Amyot and explains it—‘fled into the camp pel mel or hand over heade’—and since it is of French derivation—pelle-mesle = ‘to mix with a shovel’—it is possible that the phrase is here used for the first time.

Gathered together, these peculiarities of style seem many; and yet in truth they are few. They are the merest accidents in a great stream of rhythm. That stream flows steadily and superbly through a channel of another man's digging. For North's style is Amyot's, divided into shorter periods, strengthened with racy locutions, and decked with Elizabethan tags. In English such division was necessary: the rhythm, else, of the weightier language had gained such momentum as to escape control. But even so North's English is neither cramped nor pruned: it is still unfettered by antithesis and prodigal of display. His periods, though shorter than Amyot's, in themselves are leisurely and long. There is room in them for fine words and lofty phrases; and these go bragging by, the one following a space after the other, like cars in an endless pageant. The movement of his procession rolls on: yet he halts it at pleasure, to soften sorrow with a gracious saying, or to set a flourish on the bravery of his theme.

IV

The earliest tribute to the language of Amyot and North was the highest that has ever been, or can ever be, paid; both for its own character and the authority of those who gave it. For Montaigne, the greatest literary genius in France during the sixteenth century, wrote thus of Amyot: ‘Nous estions perdus, si ce livre ne nous eust tires du bourbier: sa mercy, nous osons a cette heure parler et escrire’;¹²⁹ and Shakespeare, the first poet of all time, borrowed three plays almost wholly from North. I do not speak of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen, for each of which a little has been gleaned from North's Theseus; nor of the Timon of Athens, although here the debt is larger.¹³⁰ The wit of Apemantus, the Apologue of the Fig-tree, and the two variants of Timon's epitaph, are all in North. Indeed, it was the ‘rich conceit’ of Timon's tomb by the sea-shore which touched Shakespeare's imagination, as it had touched Antony's; so that some of the restricted passion of North's Antonius, which bursts into showers of meteoric splendour in the Fourth and Fifth Acts of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, beats too, in the last lines of his Timon, with a rhythm as of billows:

                                                                                          ‘yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave, on faults forgiven.’

But in Antony and Cleopatra, as in Coriolanus and in Julius Cæsar, Shakespeare's obligation is apparent in almost all he has written. To measure it you must quote the bulk of the three plays. ‘Of the incident,’ Trench has said, ‘there is almost nothing which he does not owe to Plutarch, even as continually he owes the very wording to Sir Thomas North’;¹³¹ and he follows up this judgment with so detailed an analysis of the Julius Cæsar that I shall not attempt to labour the same ground. As regards the Coriolanus, it was noted, even by Pope, ‘that the whole history is exactly followed, and many of the principal speeches exactly copied, from the life of Coriolanus in Plutarch.’ This exactitude, apart from its intrinsic interest, may sometimes assist in restoring a defective passage. One such piece there is in ii. iii. 231 of the Cambridge Shakespeare, 1865:

‘The noble house o' the Marcians, from whence came
That Ancus Marcius, Numa's daughter's son,
Who, after great Hostilius, here was king;
Of the same house Publius and Quintus were,
That our best water brought by conduits hither.’

The Folios here read:

‘And Nobly nam'd, so twice being Censor,
Was his great Ancestor.’

It is evident that, after ‘hither,’ a line has been lost, and Rowe, Pope, Delius, and others have tried their best to recapture it. Pope, knowing of Shakespeare's debt and founding his emendation on North, could suggest nothing better than ‘And Censorinus, darling of the people’; while Delius, still more strangely, stumbled, as I must think, on the right reading, but for the inadequate reason that ‘darling of the people’ does not sound like Shakespeare. I have given in italics the words taken from North: and, applying the same method to the line suggested by Delius, you read: ‘And Censorinus that was so surnamed,’ then, in the next line, by merely shifting a comma, you read on: ‘And nobly named so, twice being Censor.’ Had Delius pointed out that he got his line simply by following Shakespeare's practice of taking so many of North's words, in their order, as would fall into blank verse, his emendation must surely have been accepted, since it involves no change in the subsequent lines of the Folios; whereas the Cambridge Shakespeare breaks one line into two, and achieves but an awkward result:

‘And [Censorinus] nobly named so,
Twice being [by the people chosen] censor.’

The closeness of Shakespeare's rendering, indicated by this use of italics, is not particular to this passage, but is universal throughout the play. Sometimes he gives a conscious turn to North's unconscious humour; as when, in the Parable of the Belly and the Members, North writes, ‘And so the bellie, all this notwithstanding laughed at their follie’; and Shakespeare writes in i. i., ‘For, look you, I may make the belly smile As well as speak.’ At others his fidelity leads him into an anachronism. North writes of Coriolanus that ‘he was even such another, as Cato would have a souldier and a captaine to be: not only terrible and fierce to laye aboute him, but to make the enemie afeard with the sound of his voyce and grimness of his countenance.’ And Shakespeare, with a frank disregard for chronology, gives the speech, Cato and all, to Titus Lartius (i. iv. 57):

                                                                                          ‘Thou wast a soldier
Even to Cato's wish, not fierce and terrible
Only in strokes; but with thy grim looks and
The thunder-like percussion of thy sounds,
Thou mad'st thine enemies shake.’

But perhaps the most curious evidence of the degree to which Shakespeare steeped himself in North is to be found in passages where he borrowed North's diction and applied it to new purposes. For instance, in North ‘a goodly horse with a capparison’ is offered to Coriolanus; in Shakespeare, at the same juncture, Lartius says of him:

                                                                                ‘O General,
Here is the steed, we the caparison.’

Shakespeare, that is, not only copies North's picture, he also uses North's palette. Throughout the play he takes the incidents, the images, and the very words of North. You read in North: ‘More over he sayed they nourished against themselves, the naughty seede and cockle of insolencie and sedition, which had been sowed and scattered abroade amongst the people.’ And in Shakespeare, iii. i. 69:

‘In soothing them we nourish 'gainst our senate
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,
Which we ourselves have plough'd for, sow'd and scatter'd.’

Of course it is not argued that Shakespeare has not contributed much of incalculable worth: the point is that he found a vast deal which he needed not to change. When Shakespeare adds, iv. vii. 33:

                                        ‘I think he 'll be to Rome
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature,’

he is turning prose into poetry. When he creates the character of Menenius Agrippa from North's allusion to ‘certaine of the plesauntest olde men,’ he is turning narrative into drama, as he is, too, in his development of Volumnia, from a couple of references and one immortal speech. But these additions and developments can in no way minimise the fact that he takes from North that speech, and the two others which are the pivots of the play, as they stand. There is the one in which Coriolanus discovers himself to Aufidius. I take it from the Cambridge Shakespeare, and print the actual borrowings in italics (iv. v. 53):

COR.
(Unmuffling)                                                                      If, Tullus,
Not yet thou knowest me, and, seeing me, dost not
Think me for the man I am, necessity
Commands me to name myself. …
My name is Caius Marcius, who hath done
To thee particularly, and to all the Volsces,
Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may
My surname, Coriolanus: the painful service,
The extreme dangers, and the drops of blood
Shed for my thankless country, are requited
But with that surname; a good memory,
And witness of the malice and displeasure
Which thou shouldst bear me: only that name remains;
The cruelty and envy of the people,
Permitted by our dastard nobles, who
Have all forsook me, hath devour'd the rest;
And suffer'd me by the voice of slaves to be
Whoop'd out of Rome. Now, this extremity
Hath brought me to thy hearth: not out of hope—
Mistake me not—to save my life, for if
I had fear'd death, of all men i' the world
I would have voided thee; but in mere spite
To be full quit of those my banishers,
Stand I before thee here. Then if thou hast
A heart of wreak in thee, that wilt revenge
Thine own particular wrongs and stop those maims
Of shame seen through thy country, speed thee straight,
And make my misery serve thy turn: so use it
That my revengeful services may prove
As benefits to thee; for I will fight
Against my canker'd country with the spleen
Of all the under fiends. But if so be
Thou darest not this and that to prove more fortunes
Thou 'rt tired, then, in a word, I also am
Longer to live most weary.’

The second, which is Volumnia's (v. iii. 94), is too long for quotation. It opens thus:

‘Should we be silent and not speak, our raiment
And state of bodies would bewray what life
We have led since thy exile. Think with thyself
How more unfortunate than all living women
Are we come hither’;

and here, to illustrate Shakespeare's method of rhythmical condensation, is the corresponding passage in North. ‘If we helde our peace (my sonne) and determined not to speake, the state of our poore bodies, and present sight of our raiment, would easily bewray to thee what life we have led at home, since thy exile and abode abroad. But thinke now with thyself, howe much more unfortunately, then all the women livinge we are come hether.’ I have indicated by italics the words that are common to both, but even so, I can by no means show the sum of Shakespeare's debt, or so much as hint at the peculiar glory of Sir Thomas's prose. There is no mere question of borrowed language; for North and Shakespeare have each his own excellence, of prose and of verse. Shakespeare has taken over North's vocabulary, and that is much; but it is more that behind that vocabulary he should have found such an intensity of passion as would fill the sails of the highest drama. North has every one of Shakespeare's most powerful effects in his version of the speech: ‘Trust unto it, thou shalt no soner marche forward to assault thy countrie, but thy foote shall treade upon thy mothers wombe, that brought thee first into this world’; ‘Doest thou take it honourable for a nobleman to remember the wrongs and injuries done him’; ‘Thou hast not hitherto shewed thy poore mother any courtesy’: these belong to North, and they are the motors of Shakespeare's emotion. The two speeches, dressed, the one in perfect prose, the other in perfect verse, are both essentially the same under their faintly yet magically varied raiment. The dramatic tension, the main argument, the turns of pleading, even the pause and renewal of entreaty, all are in North, and are expressed by the same spoken words and the same gap of silence. In the blank verse a shorter cadence is disengaged from the ampler movement of prose; here and there, too, a line is added. ‘To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air,’ could only have been written by an Elizabethan dramatist; even as

‘When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood,
Has clucked thee to the wars, and safely home,’

could only have been written by Shakespeare. The one is extravagant, the other beautiful; but the power and the pathos are complete without them, for these reside in the substance and the texture of the mother's entreaty, which are wholly North's. It is just to add that, saving for some crucial touches, as in the substitution of ‘womb’ for ‘corps,’ they belong also to Amyot. To the mother's immortal entreaty there follows the son's immortal reply: the third great speech of Shakespeare's play. It runs in Amyot: ‘“O mère, que m'as tu fait?” et en luy serrant estroittement la main droitte: “Ha,” dit-il, “mère, tu as vaincu une victoire heureuse pour ton païs, mais bien malheureuse et mortelle pour ton filz: car je m'en revois vaincu, par toi seule.”’ In North: ‘“Oh mother, what have you done to me?” And holding her hard by the right hand, “Oh mother,” sayed he, “you have wonne a happy victorie for your countrie, but mortall and unhappy for your sonne; for I see myself vanquished by you alone.”’ North accepts the precious jewel from Amyot, without loss of emotion or addition of phrase: he repeats the desolate question, the singultus of repeated apostrophe, the closing note of unparalleled doom. Shakespeare, too, accepts them in turn from North; and one is sorry that even he should have added a word.

What, it may be asked, led Shakespeare, amid all the power and magnificence of North's Plutarch, to select his Coriolanus, his Julius Cæsar, and his Antonius? The answer, I think, must be that in Volumnia, Calpurnia and Portia, and Cleopatra, he found woman in her three-fold relation to man, of mother, wife, and mistress. I have passed over Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar; but I may end by tracing in his Antony the golden tradition he accepted from Amyot and North. It is impossible to do this in detail, for throughout the first three acts all the colour and the incident, throughout the last two all the incident and the passion, are taken by Shakespeare from North, and by North from Amyot. Enobarbus's speech (ii. ii. 194), depicting the pageant of Cleopatra's voyage up the Cydnus to meet Antony, is but North's ‘The manner how he fell in love with her was this.’ Cleopatra's barge with its poop of gold and purple sails, and its oars of silver, which ‘kept stroke, after the sound of the musicke of flutes’; her own person in her pavilion, cloth of gold of tissue, even as Venus is pictured; her pretty boys on each side of her, like Cupids, with their fans; her gentlewomen like the Nereides, steering the helm and handling the tackle; the ‘wonderful passing sweete savor of perfumes that perfumed the wharfe-side’; all down to Antony ‘left post alone in the market-place in his Imperiall seate,’ are translated bodily from the one book to the other, with but a little added ornament of Elizabethan fancy. Shakespeare, indeed, is saturated with North's language and possessed by his passion. He is haunted by the story as North has told it, so that he even fails to eliminate matters which either are nothing to his purpose or are not susceptible of dramatic presentment: as in i. ii. of the Folios, where you find Lamprias, Plutarch's grandfather, and his authority for many details of Antony's career, making an otiose entry as Lamprius, among the characters who have something to say. Everywhere are touches whose colour must remain comparatively pale unless they glow again for us as, doubtless, they glowed for Shakespeare, with hues reflected from the passages in North that shone in his memory. For instance, when his Antony says (i. i. 53):

‘To-night we 'll wander through the streets and note
The qualities of people,’

you need to know from North that ‘sometime also when he would goe up and downe the citie disguised like a slave in the night, and would peere into poore men's windowes and their shops, and scold and brawl with them within the house; Cleopatra would be also in a chamber-maides array, and amble up and down the streets with him’; for the fantastic rowdyism of this Imperial masquerading is all but lost in Shakespeare's hurried allusion. During his first three Acts Shakespeare merely paints the man and the woman who are to suffer and die in his two others; and for these portraits he has scraped together all his colour from the many such passages as are scattered through the earlier and longer portion of North's Antonius. Antony's Spartan endurance in bygone days, sketched in Cæsar's speech (i. iv. 59)—

                                                                                ‘Thou didst drink
The stale of horses and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at: thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge;
Yea, like a stag when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou brousedst. On the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on’—

is thus originated by North: ‘It was a wonderful example to the souldiers, to see Antonius that was brought up in all fineness and superfluity, so easily to drink puddle water, and to eate wild fruits and rootes: and moreover, it is reported that even as they passed the Alpes, they did eate the barks of trees, and such beasts as never man tasted their flesh before.’ For his revels in Alexandria, Shakespeare has taken ‘the eight wild boars roasted whole’ (ii. ii. 183); for Cleopatra's disports, the diver who ‘did hang a salt fish on his hook’ (ii. v. 17). In iii. iii. the dialogue with the Soothsayer, with every particular of Antony's Demon overmatched by Cæsar's, and of his ill luck with Cæsar at dice, cocking, and quails; in iii. x. the galley's name, Antoniad; and in iii. vi. Cæsar's account of the coronation on a ‘tribunal silver'd,’ and of Cleopatra's ‘giving audience’ in the habiliment of the Goddess Isis, are other such colour patches. And this, which is true of colour, is true also of incident in the first three Acts. The scene near Misenum in ii. vi., with the light talk between Pompey and Antony, is hardly intelligible apart from North: ‘Whereupon Antonius asked him (Sextus Pompeius), “And where shall we sup?” “There,” sayd Pompey; and showed him his admiral galley … “that,” said he, “is my father's house they have left me.” He spake it to taunt Antonius because he had his father's house.’ On the galley in the next scene, the offer of Menas, ‘Let me cut the cable,’ and Pompey's reply ‘Ah, this thou shouldst have done and not have spoke on't!’ may be read almost textually in North: ‘“Shall I cut the gables of the ankers?” Pompey having paused a while upon it, at length answered him: “thou shouldst have done it and never told it me.”’ In iii. vii. the old soldier's appeal to Antony not to fight by sea, with all his arguments; in ii. xi. Antony's offer to his friends of a ship laden with gold; in iii. xii. his request to Cæsar that he may live at Athens; in iii. xiii. the whipping of Thyreus, with Cleopatra's announcement, when Antony is pacified, that ‘Since my lord Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra—’¹³² all these incidents are compiled from the many earlier pages of North's Antonius. But in the Fourth Act Shakespeare changes his method: he has no more need to gather and arrange. Rather the concentrated passion, born of, and contained in, North's serried narrative, expands in his verse—nay, explodes from it—into those flashes of immortal speech which have given the Fourth Act of Antony and Cleopatra its place apart even in Shakespeare. Of all that may be said of North's Plutarch, this perhaps is of deepest significance: that every dramatic incident in Shakespeare's Fourth Act is contained in two, and in his Fifth Act, in one and a half folio pages of the Antonius. Let me rehearse the incidents. The Fourth Act opens with Antony's renewed challenge to Cæsar, and is somewhat marred by Shakespeare's too faithful following of an error in North's translation.

                                        ‘Let the old ruffian know
I have many other ways to die’

is taken from North; but North has mistaken Amyot, who correctly renders Plutarch's version of the repartee, that ‘he (Antony) has many other ways to die’: (‘Cesar luy feit response, qu'il avoit beaucoup d'autre moiens de mourir que celuy là.’) In North, this second challenge comes after (1) the sally in which Antony drove Cæsar's horsemen back to their camp (iv. vii.); (2) the passage in which he ‘sweetly kissed Cleopatra, armed as he was,’ and commended to her a wounded soldier (iv. viii.); (3) the subsequent defection of that soldier, which Shakespeare, harking back to the earlier defection of Domitius, described by North before Actium, develops into Enobarbus's defection and Antony's magnanimity (iv. v.), with Enobarbus's repentance and death (iv. vi. and ix.). In North, hard after the challenge follows the supper at which Antony made his followers weep (iv. ii.) and the mysterious music portending the departure of Hercules (iv. iii.). The latter passage is so full of awe that I cannot choose but quote. ‘Furthermore,’ says North, ‘the self same night within little of midnight, when all the citie was quiet, full of feare, and sorrowe, thinking what would be the issue and end of this warre: it is said that sodainly they heard a marvelous sweete harmonie of sundrie sortes of instruments of musicke, with the crie of a multitude of people, as they had beene dauncing, and had song as they use in Bacchus feastes, with movinges and turninges after the manner of the satyres, and it seemed that this daunce went through the city unto the gate that opened to the enemies, and that all the troupe that made this noise they heard went out of the city at that gate. Now, such as in reason sought the interpretation of this wonder, thought that it was the god unto whom Antonius bare singular devotion to counterfeate and resemble him, that did forsake them.’¹³³ The incident is hardly susceptible of dramatic representation, but Shakespeare, as it were spellbound by his material, must even try his hand at a miracle. Follows, in North, the treachery of Cleopatra's troops; Antony's accusation of Cleopatra (iv. x. xi. and xii.); Cleopatra's flight to the monument and the false message of her death (iv. xiii.); Antony's dialogue with Eros, the suicide of Eros, and the attempt of Antony (iv. xiv.); and the death of Antony (iv. xv.). Every incident in Shakespeare's Act is contained in these two pages of North; and not only the incidents but the very passion of the speeches. ‘O Cleopatra,’ says Antonius, ‘it grieveth me not that I have lost thy companie, for I will not be long from thee; but I am sorry, that having bene so great a captaine and emperour, I am in deede condemned to be judged of less corage and noble minde then a woman.’ Or take, again, the merciless realism of Cleopatra's straining to draw Antony up into the monument:—‘Notwithstanding Cleopatra would not open the gates, but came to the high windowes, and cast out certaine chaines and ropes, in the which Antony was trussed: and Cleopatra her oune selfe, with two women only, which she had suffered to come with her into these monuments, trised Antonius up. They that were present to behold it, said they never saw so pitiefull a sight. For they plucked poore Antonius all bloody as he was, and drawing on with pangs of death, who holding up his hands to Cleopatra, raised up him selfe as well as he could. It was a hard thing for these women to do, to lift him up: but Cleopatra stooping downe with her head, putting to all her strength to her uttermost power, did lift him up with much adoe, and never let goe her hold, with the helpe of the women beneath that bad her be of good corage, and were as sorie to see her labour so, as she her selfe. So when she had gotten him in after that sorte, and layed him on a bed: she rent her garments upon him, clapping her breast, and scratching her face and stomake. Then she dried up his blood that berayed his face, and called him her Lord, her husband, and Emperor, forgetting her miserie and calamitie, for the pitie and compassion she took of him.’ In all this splendour North is Amyot, and Amyot is Plutarch, while Plutarch is but the reporter of events within the recollection of men he had seen living; so that Shakespeare's Fourth Act is based on old-world realism made dynamic by North's incomparable prose. Then come Antony's call for wine and his last speech, which Shakespeare has taken with scarce a change: ‘And for himself, that she should not lament nor sorrowe for the miserable chaunge of his fortune at the end of his dayes: but rather that she should thinke him the more fortunate, for the former triumphe and honors he had received, considering that while he lived he was the noblest and greatest prince of the world, and that now he was overcome not cowardly, but valiantly, a Romane by another Romane.’ In Shakespeare:

                                                                      ‘Please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes
Wherein I liv'd: the greatest prince o' the world,
The noblest: and do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman, a Roman by a Roman
Valiantly vanquished.’

To the end of the play the poet's fidelity is as close; and North's achievement in narrative prose is only less signal than Shakespeare's in dramatic verse. Every characteristic touch, even to Cleopatra's outburst against Seleucus, is in North. Indeed, in the Fifth Act I venture to say that Shakespeare has not transcended his original. There is in North a speech of Cleopatra at the tomb of Antony, which can ill be spared; since it is only indicated in Shakespeare (v. ii. 303) by a brief apostrophe—

                                                            ‘O, couldst thou speak,
That I might hear thee call great Cæsar ass
Unpolicied’—

which is often confused with the context addressed to the asp. In North you read: ‘She was carried to the place where his tombe was, and there falling downe on her knees, imbracing the tombe with her women, the teares running doune her cheekes, she began to speake in this sorte: “O my deare Lord Antonius, not long sithence I buried thee here, being a free woman: and now I offer unto thee the funerall sprinklinges and oblations, being a captive and prisoner, and yet I am forbidden and kept from tearing and murdering this captive body of mine with blowes, which they carefully gard and keepe, only to triumphe of thee: looke therefore henceforth for no other honors, oferinges, nor sacrifices from me, for these are the last which Cleopatra can geve thee, sith nowe they carie her away. Whilest we lived together nothing could sever our companies: but now at our death, I feare me they will make us chaunge our countries. For as thou being a Romane, hast been buried in Ægypt: even so wretched creature I, an Ægyptian, shall be buried in Italie, which shall be all the good that I have received of thy contrie. If therefore the Gods where thou art now have any power and authoritie, sith our gods here have forsaken us: suffer not thy true friend and lover to be caried away alive, that in me, they triumphe of thee: but receive me with thee, and let me be buried in one selfe tombe with thee. For though my griefes and miseries be infinite, yet none hath grieved me more, nor that I could lesse beare withall: then this small time, which I had been driven to live alone without thee.”’ Her prayer is granted. The countryman comes in with his figs; and then, ‘Her death was very sodaine. For those whom Cæsar sent unto her ran thither in all hast possible, and found the souldiers standing at the gate, mistrusting nothing, nor understanding of her death. But when they opened the dores, they found Cleopatra starke dead, layed upon a bed of gold, attired and araied in her royall robes, and one of her two women, which was called Iras, dead at her feete; and her other woman called Charmion halfe dead, and trembling, trimming the Diademe which Cleopatra ware upon her head. One of the souldiers seeing her, angrily sayd unto her: “Is that well done, Charmion?” “Verie well,” sayd she againe, “and meet for a Princes discended from the race of so many noble kings.” She sayd no more, but fell doune dead hard by the bed.’

I doubt if there are many pages which may rank with these last of North's Antonius in the prose of any language. They are the golden crown of his Plutarch, but their fellows are all a royal vesture wrapping a kingly body. For the Parallel Lives is a book most sovereign in its dominion over the minds of great men in every age. Henri iv., in a loveletter, written between battles, to his young wife, Marie de Médicis, speaks of it as no other such hero has spoken of any other volume, amid such dire surroundings and in so dear a context. But if it has armed men of action, it has urged men of letters. Macaulay claimed it for his ‘forte … to give a life after the manner of Plutarch,’ and he tells us that, between the writing of two pages, when for weeks a solitary at his task, he would ‘ramble five or six hours over rocks and through copsewood with Plutarch.’ Of good English prose there is much, but of the world's greatest books in great English prose there are not many. Here is one, worthy to stand with Malory's Morte Darthur on either side the English Bible.

Notes

1. Αρεωs ὀρχήsτραν. (Marcellus, 21.) This contrast has been noted by R. C. Trench, D.D., in his Plutarch. Five Lectures, 1874. An admirable volume full of suggestion.

2. Plutarch's Morals. Philemon Holland, 1657, p. 1078, in a letter addressed to Terentius Priscus, ‘On oracles that have ceased to give answers.’

3. Paulus Æmilius.

4. Cæsar.

5. Preface to Pericles.

6. Lycurgus.

7. In North's edition of 1579 all is Plutarch, through Amyot, excepting the Annibal and the Scipio African, which were manufactured by Donato Acciaiuoli for the Latin translation of the Lives published at Rome by Campani in 1470.

8. Freeman, Methods of Historic Study, p. 168. Mahaffy, Life and Thought.

9. A. H. Clough, Plutarch's Lives. 1883.

10. The marriage of Pirithous, p. 62, and the ravishment of the Sabines, 85.

11. In the Themistocles and in the Aristides.

12. Professor Skeat, in his Shakespeare's Plutarch, leaves the attribution of these initials in doubt. They have been taken by many French editors of Amyot to stand for B. de Girard, Sieur du Haillan, but M. de Blignières shows in his Essai sur Amyot, p. 184, that they stood for Simon Goulard, the translator of Seneca.

13. Letter of dedication to Queen Elizabeth. Ed. 1631, p. 1108.

14. Fabricated also by Acciaiuoli for Campani's Latin edition of 1470, and attributed to Plutarch by an erudite calling himself Viscellius. Amyot himself fabricated the lives of Epaminondas and Scipio (minor) at the request of Marguerite of Savoye, but never published them as Plutarch.

15. Plutarch. Five Lectures, p. 89. Paul-Louis Courier and many others have written to the same effect, questioning Plutarch's accuracy and insight. On the question of accuracy, I am content to quote Ste.-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vi. 333: ‘Quand on a fait la part du rhéteur et du prêtre d'Apollon en lui, il reste une bien plus large part encore, ce me semble, au collecteur attentif et consciencieux des moindres traditions sur les grands hommes, au peintre abondant et curieux de la nature humaine’: and to refer to Freeman, Methods of Historical Study, pp. 167, 168, 184.

16. Numa Pompilius: marred in North by a mistranslation. In the original it approximates to the Copernican rather than to the Ptolemaic theory.

17. Pericles.

18. Timoleon.

19. Comparison of Demetrius with Antonius.

20. Themistocles.

21. Furius Camillus.

22. The Moral Ideal, Julia Wedgwood, p. 82.

23. Comparison of Lycurgus with Numa Pompilius.

24. Lycurgus.

25. Numa Pompilius.

26. Paulus Æmilius.

27. In his interview with Casaubon. See Ste.-Beuve: Causeries du Lundi, xiv. 402.

28. Mommsen: he uses the phrase of Cicero.

29. Preface to the Cimon and Lucullus.

30. Agis and Cleomenes.

31. Plutarch's Cato is accepted bodily by Mommsen for a typical ‘Roman burgess.’ History of Rome, vol. ii. pp. 429-432.

32. Brutus.

33. See also his account of the several manners of Cleon and Pericles.

34. Fabius Maximus.

35. Agesilaus.

36. Sylla.

37. Marcellus.

38. Pompey.

39. Aratus.

40. See the rousing of Greece in the Philopœmen; the declaration of liberty in the Flaminius; the squadron of the Lacedæmonians at Platæa in the Aristides; the glimpse of Philip at Chæronea gazing at the ‘Holy Band of Thebans all dead on the grounde’ in the Pelopidas; the first ride of Alexander on Bucephalus in the Alexander; the Macedonians at Pydna in the Paulus Æmilius.

41. See the country of the Cimbri in the Marius, and the campaigns of Lucullus and Crassus.

42. Agesilaus.

43. Alexander.

44. Antonius.

45. Shakespeare's Volumnia.

46. Coriolanus.

47. Sertorius.

48. Alexander.

49. Agesilaus.

50. Cruserius, who translated the Lives into Latin (1561), by a strange coincidence, mourned his daughter's loss and found consolation in his task.

51. Cato Utican.

52. Pompey.

53. Cato.

54. Themistocles.

55. Crassus.

56. See Themistocles as the rival of Cimon.

57. Comparison of Numa Pompilius with Lycurgus.

58. Comparison of Numa Pompilius with Lycurgus.

59. See his defence of it in Cicero, his attack on Cato for opposing it, and passim.

60. Marcellus.

61. Julius Cæsar.

62. Publicola.

63. Agis and Cleomenes.

64. Sylla.

65. Paulus Æmilius.

66. Alcibiades.

67. Julius Cæsar.

68. Furius Camillus.

69. Furius Camillus.

70. Numa Pompilius.

71. Alexander. Cf. Plutarch's Morals, Phil. Holland, 1657: the eighth book of Symposiaques; the first question, p. 628.

72. In the Brutus North credits its hero with a declaration of belief in another life. But this is a mistranslation of Amyot's French. We know, however, with what passionate conviction Plutarch held this belief in ‘a better place, and a happier condition,’ from the conclusion of his ‘consolatory letter, sent unto his own wife, as touching the death of her and his daughter.’—Morals, Phil. Holland, 1657, p. 442.

73. Vol. cx., No. 220, p. 459, Oct. 1861. Apparently Archbishop Trench.

74. Brantôme.

75. Blignières. According to another, parentibus honestis magis quam copiosis.

76. Before 1530 only a few Homeric Hymns and some essays of Plutarch had been published.

77. The Marguerite of The Heptameron.

78. Published in 1547 with an interesting passage in the proem: ‘Et n'avoit ce livre jamais esté imprimé, sinon depuis que la librairie du roi Matthias Corvin fut saccagée, au quel sac il se trouva un soldat allemant qui mit la main dessus pour ce qu'il le vit richement estofé, et le vendit à celuy qui depuys le fit imprimer en Allemaigne.’

79. Published without his name as late as 1559. As tutor to the young princes he seems to have entertained a certain scruple, which even led him to suppress one passage in his translation.

80. 1546. The last benefice bestowed by François.

81. Of which he translated and published seven in 1554.

82. Amyot: Aux Lecteurs.

83. Grand Almoner and Librarian of the Royal Library.

84. Brantôme.

85. Who undertook to translate Plutarch, but failed to do so.

86. Discours de la Traduction, 1635 (cf. Blignières, p. 435).

87. Plutarch's Lives; Aubrey Stewart, M.A., and the late George Long, M.A., 1880, vol. i. p. xvii.

88. Causeries du Lundi, iv. 469.

89. Dedication to Henri ii.

90. Aux Lecteurs.

91. See Dictionary of National Biography, which gives fuller information than I have found elsewhere.

92. Subsequent editions, 1568, 1582, 1619.

93. Second edition, 1601. Reprinted as The Fables of Bidpai, with an Introduction by Joseph Jacobs, 1888.

94. Dedication to Elizabeth.

95. In the Numa.

96. The first edition of 1559, compared by me with Amyot's second edition of 1565. I had not the third, of 1567, from which North translated; but on several points I have referred to the copy in the British Museum.

97. Greek ἀδήκτωs: Lat., Ed. Princeps (1470), ‘sine morsu.’ Long has another reading and translation, but most will agree that Amyot's is not a blunder but an emendation.

98. 1579; 1595; 1603; 1612; 1631; 1657; 1676.

99. Cf. for instance, in the Antonius, Cleopatra on the Cydnus; the death of Antonius; and the death of Cleopatra.

100. Gustave Lanson, La littérature française (1894), p. 223.

101. Numa Pompilius.

102. Corrected and revised by A. H. Clough, 1883.

103. Dryden, in his dedication to the Duke of Ormonde (1683), spoke of North as ungrammatical and ungraceful. The version he signed was ‘executed by several hands’; but with his name on the title-page it displaced North's, which is now for the first time since republished.

104. See Plutarch's Lives: Stewart and Long, iii. 572.

105. Deffense et illustration de la Langue françoise.

106. Publicola.

107. Lycurgus.

108. Numa.

109. Dedication to Elizabeth.

110. Amyot: Aux Lecteurs.

111. Numa.

112. Amyot: ‘Comme estant telle habitation et convenable à la nature souverainement heureuse et immortelle.’

113. Pericles.

114. The Greek epithet is rendered by the word arrogant in Clough's revised Dryden, and by the word vulgar in Mr. Stewart's translation.

115. Numa.

116. Coriolanus.

117. Fabius Maximus.

118. Fabius Maximus.

119. Lycurgus.

120. Publicola.

121. Solon.

122. The old prize for a racehorse.

123. Publicola.

124. Camillus.

125. Ibid.

126. Timoleon.

127. Fables of Bidpai, 1888, p. 11.

128. Paulus Æmilius; in a gorgeous description of the Macedonian phalanx, from spick = a spike, and span = a splinter.

129. Essais, ii. iv.

130. It is founded on one passage in the Alcibiades and another in the Antony.

131. Plutarch. Five Lectures, p. 66.

132. One of North's mistranslations: she kept Antony's birthday, not her own.

133. Translated word for word from Amyot. Any one who cares to pursue this tradition of beauty still further towards its sources will find that in the Antonius Amyot was in turn the debtor of Leonardus Aretinus, who did the life into Latin for the editio princeps (1470) of Campani.