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But after their unequal fortunes they both died, as Plutarch thinks, most happily and opportunely: the one just before the sweeping of a flood of civil troubles over the distracted Roman commonwealth; the other at the moment when his country, in the height of its power and freedom, was honourably recognis ing his greatest victory. And it appears to be this timely termination of their stories, this instance of being taken away from the evil to come, that most pleases Plutarch as a sign of the divine favour which crowned their not inconsiderable works on earth by a not unsatisfactory end.

Where Plutarch wishes to tell a great story effectively and pathetically, there are few writers to be named who can surpass him in that effect and pathos which arise from a completeness of imagination, a skilful arrangement of materials, and a knowledge of the true chords of human sympathy which are to be touched. We might pick out, as one instance among many, the narrative of Pompey's fall. The single weakness of Pompey's character, which made him fight his last battle upon the plain of Pharsalia against his own better judgment, in compliance with the impatience of his injudicious friends, is pointed at as adequately commented on by the issue of the contest. The spectacle which Pompey's camp, set out as for the banquet in honour of an assured victory, presented to Cæsar's grim veterans after the rout of Pompey's army, is significantly sketched out as an illustration of the fated folly and vanity of the men who had boasted themselves before putting on their harness as though they were putting it off. But from the moment when the adventitious greatness of station is stripped off the fallen hero, the critical tone of the biographer turns into one of solemn, grave compassion. We see the man who had in the name of Rome conquered Mithridates and the pirates, and who had been the foremost figure of the world until the greater star of Cæsar rose, leaving the slain and the wounded and the wreck of his fortunes behind him,-dismounting and walking on softly afoot with a few friends as his sole retinue,-taken up altogether, says Plutarch, with such thoughts as would naturally possess a man who for thirty-four years had been accustomed to victory, and was then at last in his old age learning the meaning of defeat and flight for the first time. There is a clear sorrowful picturesqueness in the whole tale of Pompey's embarkation on board the Roman merchant vessel that chanced to be lying off the mouth of the valley of Tempe, his meeting his young noble wife Cornelia at Mitylene, and his sail down the coasts of Asia Minor to Cyprus, gathering as he went scattered remnants of his party, and debating on the best chances of retrieving those fortunes which were not destined to be retrieved. There, either, thinks

Plutarch, from apprehension of the treatment his wife might receive among the Parthians, or from the prompting "of some superior power," he again acted against his own judgment, and sailed for the fatal shores of Egypt. It is impossible not to sympathise in reading with the feeling of the biographer, that "it was indeed a miserable thing that the fate of the great Pompey" should lie in the hands of the king's eunuch, rhetoric-master, and chamberlain. We are told, with a quiet and impressive simplicity of style befitting the last scene of a tragedy, how the great Roman was murdered as he was stepping from the boat on the flat sandy shore of the Pelusiac mouth of the Nile. When Pompey felt the treacherous stab from behind, and saw the other swords drawn round him, he felt, with that instinctive readiness of dignity which we cannot but believe to have been characteristic of ancient Rome (however unlike to the ordinary demeanour of modern men and women under ordinary circumstances), that all that was left was to die as became a Roman conqueror. So, "taking up his gown with both his hands, he drew it over his face, and neither saying nor doing any thing unworthy of himself, only groaning a little, endured the wounds they gave him, and so ended his life in the fifty-ninth year of his age, the very next day after the day of his birth." It is clear that Plutarch takes peculiar pleasure in reciting the details of the pious offices paid with scanty means to Pompey's corpse upon the shore by his old freedman Philip, and the appropriate vengeance taken by fate upon one after another of the miserable assassins. The eunuch and the chamberlain were put to death by Cæsar; the weak young king Ptolemy, in whose name the murder was committed, after being overthrown in battle upon the banks of the Nile, fled away, and was never heard of more. The politic Greek rhetoric-master, who had counselled the base deed as the best method of getting rid of Cæsar's rival, fled from justice, and lived "a vagabond in banishment, wandering up and down, despised and hated of all men," until, after Cæsar's end, he fell into the hands of Brutus, who put him to death with every kind of ignominy. Then, and not till then, when his pen has written down the execution of their several penalties upon Pompey's murderers, does Plutarch wind up his story with the restitution of the great Roman's ashes to his wife, for honourable sepulture among the urns of his country-house, in sight of Rome. There are fine pictures and noble thoughts, however pedantically spun out, in Lucan's Pharsalian epic; but the real grandeur and simplicity of epic conception is as much more visible in Plutarch's mode of telling the tale than in Lucan's, as it is in Mr. Tennyson's Idylls of the Court of King Arthur than in Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's poem.

Besides the fifty completed individual likenesses, and the thousands of other episodical sketches of character and story, preserved in Plutarch's volumes, and so largely interwoven by all the earlier popular authorities of our own childhood with the historical thread of the annals of Greece and Rome,there is retailed in the Lives an infinite variety of the detail of ancient customs here and there, such as are familiar to all classical students, without their knowing from what source their information has been derived. Any body who will take the well-repaid trouble of reading his Plutarch through again in later life, will feel surprised at the recognition of so many old friends in the shape of manners and customs, and at the fullness of those accessory illustrations which give so substantial a reality to the great idealised picture of the Greek and Roman world which Plutarch drew. The same facts are undoubtedly often to be found elsewhere, in the authorities from which Plutarch's own knowledge is confessedly taken, as well as in other authors whom he is not proved to have studied. But it may be doubted whether they have ever been told with superior or equal clearness, and whether their familiarity to modern ears does not spring more generally from the often-translated and widely-read Lives of Plutarch than from the pages of writers who have been mainly studied in the original tongue. It may sound paradoxical to assert, that the intrinsic worth of Plutarch is more thoroughly appreciated among us because we know him only in translations; but it is unquestionably true. Not only would his name never have become such a household world through modern Europe, had it been the supposed duty of all classical students to struggle with his style before they could arrive at his meaning, but the breadth of familiarity, the power of taking him in all at once, which is now within the reach of every clear-headed English reader, could have been then attained by very few among the narrower circle of those who would in that case have read him. It is as necessary to read a contemporary historian in his own words as if he were a poet; but Plutarch is neither a historian nor a writer on contemporary things. He views his antique heroes entirely from without, and places them as regularly upon one broad plateau apart from his own every-day world of Trajan's era, as does Mr. Watts in his great allegorical fresco, "The Progress of Legislation." There is an obvious and irreconcilable anachronism in bringing together Moses and Confucius, and the three English Barons from Runnymede, and Theodora and Justinian, in a place which is neither earth nor heaven, but something between them. From Romulus and Theseus to Philopomen and Flamininus, there is the same -not identity of level, but-easy gradation of a receding slope,

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and the same distinctive separation from the costume of ordinary life and thought, observable in Plutarch's Lives when read as a whole. The material defect or improbability is cured in either case by the serene grandeur of the scheme, and the uniform nobility of the treatment. But as to study at our ease the full meaning of Mr. Watts' composition, we desire a reduced drawing or an explanatory key, which may engrave itself on our minds, without hours of staring up at the fresco itself in its lofty place in Lincoln's-Inn Hall; so, for the real enjoyment of Plutarch, it is best to know him familiarly as an English author, to be able to overlook him rapidly or to dwell on him at length, without the loss of vividness which is always involved in the reading of a translation, when once you have received your earliest impressions from the original.

We said just now, that it is the fullness and truth of the accessory illustration which confers the lifelike look on the idealised portraiture of thought and character which are given us in Plutarch. Take, for instance, the description of the Parthian skirmishing in the story of the fatal expedition of Crassus. It is as clear, characteristic, and picturesque as any dramatic pageant Mr. Charles Kean or Mr. Macready ever put upon the stage; more like Napier's account of the Peninsular battles which he had seen himself, than like a derivative account of a campaign long before the writer's own time. And it is a description of which the visible reality will never fade; least of all during the progress of military science towards a point where the Parthian tactics of fighting flying will be more available, if not more universal, than they have been for many centuries, in proportion to the increasing range and certainty of missile weapons. The principles of destruction, as well as the details of life and the objects of living, are governed by the same rules now as in the ages painted by Plutarch. Some of his stories. show how curiously human thought revolves in particular cycles, or runs in parallel grooves. The Etruscan sages, who were thought to possess a knowledge beyond other men, affirmed in the time of Sylla that a certain prodigy betokened the mutation of the age, and a general revolution of terrestrial things. Their theory supposed eight destined ages of the universe, differing from each other in the lives and the characters of men, with a divinely allotted measure of time for each. When one age had

run out, some wonderful sign from earth or heaven would at once proclaim to the students of such mysteries that a fresh race of men, with different institutions and aims, and more or less dear to the gods than their predecessors, had arisen in the world. The basis of this mythological system is clearly the same phase of thought as that which originated the golden,

silver, brazen, and iron ages of Hesiod; though Hesiod's theory of degeneration carried him no further, and foresaw no chance of alternating rise and fall. There are serious and educated Englishmen in this latter half of the nineteenth century who virtually hold the same creed with the Etruscan sages; consulting and ingeniously twisting the records and dates of sacred and profane history for the identification of the spasmodic birththroes of past ages, and sedulously looking for the appointed sign of a fresh cycle. So like are the permutations of speculative curiosity under different circumstances and different influences. Although "the knowledge of divine things" may be "for the most part lost to us by incredulity," we prefer to hold with Plutarch himself that God does not govern the world by the irresistible force of successive and sudden revolutions for better or worse, but by the persuasive argument and reason of gradual change, controlling the race of men into compliance with his eternal purposes.

Shortly before the days of Shakespeare's reading Plutarch's Lives in England, Montaigne was studying both his Lives and his other writings in France. As he supplied the genius of the poetical magician with the concentrated essence of three noble dramas, so did he furnish the discursive mind of the moralising essayist with a store of thought, maxims, and illustrations, which lasted him for his whole lifetime. The one read him, and took bodily what he wanted for the purposes of his own art; and there the influence of Plutarch upon Shakespeare, so far as we know, came to an end. The other, with no such definite or immediate purpose in studying him, read him through and through, digesting him piecemeal in his rather happily suggestive than accurately retentive memory, and perpetually reproduced him in sparkling fragmentary apothegms, as an impressible pupil repeats and believes in the talk and the sentiments of an honoured master. Voluntarily and involuntarily, consciously and not, Montaigne overflowed with Plutarch, quoted Plutarch, and thought Plutarch, in every essay and every letter that he wrote. By the grace, interest, and variety of Montaigne's work, we may in some degree measure the qualities of the writer whom he took as the main source of his inspiration and his model.

But Montaigne was not the only Frenchman who studied Plutarch greedily. Rousseau did so too; and after Rousseau many of the leaders of the French Revolution. It is obvious that all the spurious classicalisms of the first French Republic, all those false imitations of an ideally severe antique virtue, in which vanity attempted to mask so much unbridled and miserable folly in the earlier scenes of that singular drama, were drawn from the characters of Plutarch mainly or alone.

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