moralist, political orator, or preacher depends on the amount of the wisdom of life that is hived in his pages.  They may be admirable by virtue of other qualities, by learning, by grasp, by majesty of flight; but it is his moral sentences on mankind or the State that rank the prose writer among the sages.  These show that he has an eye for the large truths of action, for the permanent bearings of conduct, and for things that are for the guidance of all generations.  What is it that makes Plutarch’s Lives “the pasture of great souls,” as they were called by one who was herself a great soul?  Because his aim was much less to tell a story than, as he says, “to decipher the man and his nature”; and in deciphering the man, to strike out pregnant and fruitful thoughts on all men.  Why was it worth while for Mr. Jowett, the other day, to give us a new translation of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War?  And why is it worth your while, at least to dip in a serious spirit into its pages?  Partly, because the gravity and concision of Thucydides are of specially wholesome example in these days of over-coloured and over-voluminous narrative; partly, because he knows how to invest the wreck and overthrow of those small states with the pathos and dignity of mighty imperial fall; but most of all, for the sake of the wise sentences that are sown with apt but not unsparing hand through the progress of the story.  Well might Gray ask his friend whether Thucydides’ description of the final destruction of the Athenian host at Syracuse was not the finest thing he ever read in his life; and assuredly the man who can read that stern tale without admiration, pity, and awe may be certain that he has no taste for noble composition, and no feeling for the deepest tragedy of mortal things.  But it is the sagacious sentences in the speeches of Athenians, Corinthians, Lacedaemonians, that do most of all to give to the historian his perpetuity of interest to every reader with the rudiments of a political instinct, and make Thucydides as modern as if he had written yesterday.

Tacitus belongs to a different class among the great writers of the world.  He had, beyond almost any author of the front rank that has ever lived, the art of condensing his thought and driving it home to the mind of the reader with a flash.  Beyond almost anybody, he suffered from what a famous writer of aphorisms in our time has described as “the cursed ambition to put a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and the phrase into a word.”  But the moral thought itself in Tacitus mostly belongs less to the practical wisdom of life, than to sombre poetic indignation, like that of Dante, against the perversities of men and the blindness of fortune.