Eno. Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids, So many mermaids, tended her i’ the eyes, And made their bends adornings:  at the helm A seeming mermaid steers; the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands, That yarely frame the office.  From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs.  The city cast Her people out upon her, and Antony, Enthron’d i’ th’ market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to the air, which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in Nature.

Antony and Cleopatra.  Act II.  Sc. 2.

The operations of Shakespeare’s creative imagination are rarely to be observed more distinctly than in such instances as this, where we see the precise source from which he drew, in all its original limitations and native character.  Books were to him like ingots of gold, which, passing through the mint of his brain, came out thence stamped coin, current for all time.  Viewing some of his plays, it may be said, with no real, though with apparent contradiction, that no man ever borrowed more from books, and yet none ever owed less to them.  For the Roman times Plutarch served him, as Holinshed and Hall supplied him for his English histories.  Under Plutarch’s guidance he walked through the streets of ancient Rome, and became familiar with the conduct of her men.  He is more Roman than Plutarch himself, and by divine right of imagination he makes himself a citizen of the Eternal City.  While Shakespeare was using Plutarch to such advantage, on the other hand, Ben Jonson seems to have borrowed little or nothing from him in his Roman plays.  He got what he wanted out of the Latin authors, and he succeeded in Latinizing his plays,—­in giving to his characters the dress, but not the spirit of Rome.

It was toward the end of the seventeenth century that Dryden’s translation appeared, and for about fifty years it held much the same place with the reading public that North’s had filled for previous generations.  It was, no doubt, in this version that Mrs. Fitzpatrick amused herself during her seclusion in Ireland, as she tells Sophia Western, with reading “a great deal in Plutarch’s Lives.”  But this was at length superseded by the translation of the brothers Langhorne, which, spite of its want of vivacity, its labored periods, and formal narrative, has retained its place as the popular version of Plutarch up to the present day.  One can hardly help wishing—­so little of Plutarch’s spirit survives in their dull pages—­that a similar fate had overtaken these excellent men to that which carried off the gentle Abbe Ricard with the grippe, when he had published but half of his translation of the Philosopher of Cheronaea.