[Footnote M:  Life of Alexander, at the beginning.]

It is his fidelity to this principle, his dealing with events and circumstances chiefly as they illustrate character, his delineation of the features of the souls of men, that constitutes Plutarch’s highest merit as a biographer.  He is no historian; he often neglects chronology, and disregards the sequence of events; he omits many incidents, and he avoids the details of national and political affairs.  The progress of the advance or decline of states is not to be learned from his pages.  But if his Lives be read in chronological order, much may be inferred from them of the moral condition and changes of the communities in which the men flourished whose characters and actions he describes.  Biography is thus made to cast an incidental light upon history.  The successes of Alexander give evidence of the lowering of the Greek spirit, and illustrate the immemorial weakness of Oriental tyrannies.  The victories and the defeats of Pyrrhus alike display the vigor of Republican Rome.  The character and the fate of Mark Antony show that vigor at its ebb, and foretell the near fall of the Roman liberties.  Thus in his long series of lives of noble Grecians and Romans, the motives and principles which lay at the foundation of the characters of the men who moulded the fate of Greece and Rome, the reciprocal influences of their times upon these men and of these men upon their times, may all be traced with more or less distinctness and certainty.  It was not Plutarch’s object to exhibit them in sequent evolution, but, in attaining the object which he had in view, he could not fail to make them manifest to the thoughtful reader.  His book, though not a history, is invaluable to historians.

But the character of Plutarch himself, not less than his method of writing biography, explains his universal popularity, and gives its special charm and value to his book.  He was a man of large and generous nature, of strong feeling, of refined tastes, of quick perceptions.  His mind had been cultivated in the acquisition of the best learning of his times, and was disciplined by the study of books as well as of men.  He deserves the title of philosopher; but his philosophy was of a practical rather than a speculative character,—­though he was versed in the wisest doctrines of the great masters of ancient thought, and in some of his moral works shows himself their not unworthy follower.  Above all, he was a man of cheerful, genial, and receptive temper.  A lover of justice and of liberty, his sympathies are always on the side of what is right, noble, and honorable.  He believed in a divine ordering of the world, and saw obscurely through the mists and shadows of heathenism the indications of the wisdom and rectitude of an overruling Providence.  To him man did not appear as the sole arbiter of his own destiny, but rather as an unconscious agent in working out the designs of a Higher Power; and yet, as these designs were only dimly and imperfectly to be recognized, the noblest man was he who was truest to the eternal principles of right, who was most independent of the chances and shiftings of fortune, who, “fortressed on conscience and impregnable will,” strove to live in the manliest and most self-supported relations with the world, neither fearing nor hoping much in regard to the uncertainties of the future, and who