Yet Lord Macaulay could not refrain from a sneer at Plutarch as a pedant who thought himself a great philosopher and a great politician.  Pedant he may have been; philosopher and politician he may not have been; but he was, nevertheless, the prince of biographers.  Macaulay has praised Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” as the best biography ever written.  But was not Boswell a pedant?  Was he a philosopher?  Macaulay himself has penned many biographies.  Most of them are quite above the pedantry of small facts.  Instead, they are crammed with deep philosophy, with abstractions, and with the balancing of antithetical qualities.  They are bloodless frameworks, without life or humanity,—­bundles of peculiarities skilfully grouped, and ticketed with such and such a name.  No one sees a man within.  As biographies they will not be remembered, but as instances of labored learning, of careful special pleading, and of brilliant rhetoric.  Elsewhere, however, he has descended from philosophy, and not been above the pedantry of detail.  And he has given us, in consequence, charming lives,—­successful, in fact, just so far as he has followed in the footsteps of the old Greek.  Yet who would for a moment compare his Pitt, his Goldsmith, or his William iv., as biography, with Plutarch’s Alcibiades, or Cato the Censor?  We remember the fact that Goldsmith sometimes wore a peach-blossom suit, but we see Cato in his toga.

Very many works have been written, purporting to be “The Life and Times” of this or that man.  Where a man has occupied a large historic place, has been moulded by his times, and has moulded in turn the coming years, such works are well enough as history.  As biography they are failures.  The Times get the upper hand, and thrust down the Life.  Without the Life, such works would be better, too, as history; for man and the world are two different things, and their respective provinces cannot, without confusion, be thrown into one.  Now every leading man bears a twofold character.  He is man, and something more:  he is a power in history.  Whatever concerns him as man,—­his humanity, his individuality, his personal qualities, his character and inclinations, “the marks and indications of the soul,” as Plutarch phrases it,—­all this, and hardly more than this, is matter for biography, and for that alone.  But so far as he is a representative man, standing for communities, for nations, for the world of his time,—­so far as he is an historic force, making and solving, in some degree, large human problems,—­so far as he is the organ chosen by destiny to aid in the development of his race,—­just so far he is a maker of history, and therefore its proper subject, and its alone.  Napoleon was not only a man, but he was Europe for some twenty years.  Louis xiv was the Europe of half a century.  There should be lives of such men, for they were akin to their fellows:  histories, too, should be theirs, for they were allied to Nature, and fate, and law.  They jested; and Biography, smiling, seized her tablets.  They embodied a people; and Clio, pondering, opened the long scrolls of time.