History itself is best studied in biography. Indeed, history is biography--collective humanity as influenced and governed by individual men. "What is all history," says Emerson, "but the work of ideas, a record of the incomparable energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man?" In its pages it is always persons we see more than principles. Historical events are interesting to us mainly in connection with the feelings, the sufferings, and interests of those by whom they are accomplished. In history we are surrounded by men long dead, but whose speech and whose deeds survive. We almost catch the sound of their voices; and what they did constitutes the interest of history. We never feel personally interested in masses of men; but we feel and sympathise with the individual actors, whose biographies afford the finest and most real touches in all great historical dramas. Among the great writers of the past, probably the two that have been most influential in forming the characters of great men of action and great men of thought, have been Plutarch and Montaigne--the one by presenting heroic models for imitation, the other by probing questions of constant recurrence in which the human mind in all ages has taken the deepest interest. And the works of both are for the most part cast in a biographic form, their most striking illustrations consisting in the exhibitions of character and experience which they contain. Plutarch's 'Lives,' though written nearly eighteen hundred years ago, like Homer's 'Iliad,' still holds its ground as the greatest work of its kind. It was the favourite book of Montaigne; and to Englishmen it possesses the special interest of having been Shakspeare's principal authority in his great classical dramas. Montaigne pronounced Plutarch to be "the greatest master in that kind of writing"--the biographic; and he declared that he "could no sooner cast an eye upon him but he purloined either a leg or a wing." Alfieri was first drawn with passion to literature by reading Plutarch. "I read," said he, "the lives of Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, more than six times, with cries, with tears, and with such transports, that I was almost furious.... Every time that I met with one of the grand traits of these great men, I was seized with such vehement agitation as to be unable to sit still." Plutarch was also a favourite with persons of such various minds as Schiller and Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon and Madame Roland. The latter was so fascinated by the book that she carried it to church with her in the guise of a missal, and read it surreptitiously during the service.