on Roman affairs.  His own library, or the libraries to which he had access at Chaeronea, must have been well furnished with the books most important for his studies.  He is said to quote two hundred and fifty authors, some eighty of whom are among those whose works have been wholly or partly lost.  He made careful use of his materials, which were, of course, more abundant for his Greek than for his Roman narratives.  “If we would put the Lives of Plutarch to a severe test,” says Mr. Long, than whom no one is better qualified to speak with authority upon the subject, “we must carefully examine his Roman Lives.  He says that he knew Latin imperfectly, and he lived under the Empire, when many of the educated Romans had but a superficial acquaintance with the earlier history of their state.  We must therefore expect to find him imperfectly informed on Roman institutions; and we can detect him in some errors.  Yet, on the whole, his Roman Lives do not often convey erroneous notions; if the detail is incorrect, the general impression is true.  They may be read with profit by those who seek to know something of Roman affairs, and have not knowledge enough to detect an error.  They probably contain as few mistakes as most biographies which have been written by a man who is not the countryman of those whose lives he writes.”

Yet, spite of his general accuracy and his impartial temper, the representations which Plutarch makes of the characters which he describes are not always to be accepted as fair delineations.  Unconscious prejudice, or misconception of circumstances and relations, sometimes leads him into apparent injustice.  Thus, for example, while he bears hardly upon Demosthenes, and sets out many of his actions in too unfavorable lights, he, on the other hand, interprets the conduct and character of Phocion with manifest indulgence, and presents a flattered portrait of a man whose death turned popular reproaches into pity, but was insufficient to redeem the faults of his life.

Mr. Grote, in his History, passes a very different judgment upon these two men from that to which one would be led by the perusal of Plutarch’s narratives merely.  And it is an illustration, at once, of the honesty of the ancient biographer, and of the ability of the modern historian, that Mr. Grote should not infrequently derive from Plutarch’s own account the means for correcting his false estimate of the motives and the actions of those whom he misjudged.

In an excellent passage in his Preface, Mr. Clough remarks that

“Much has been said of Plutarch’s inaccuracy; and it cannot be denied that he is careless about numbers, and occasionally contradicts his own statements.  A greater fault, perhaps, is his passion for anecdote; he cannot forbear from repeating stories the improbability of which he is the first to recognize, which, nevertheless, by mere repetition, leave unjust impressions.  He is unfair in this way to Demosthenes and Pericles,—­against the latter of whom, however, he doubtless inherited the prejudices which Plato handed down to the philosophers.