As an art, biography is older than the invention of writing. Doubtless it has existed since the creation of man. In ancient times, it took the form of tradition, transmitted by word of mouth, which later became the foundation of legends and mythology. It has now reached a high degree of development; this is the best proof that man is unable to build his life on the present alone, or on hope of the future. He must still refer to the past for encouragement and stimulation. To begin at the beginning, the masters of the remote ages had left to the world great treasures of biographical matter; from Xenophon we know about the philosophers, especially Socrates. The life of Alexander the Great is set down in immortal words by Quintus Curtius; Tacitus has left a biography of Agricola, familiarity with which is part of the classical education; and to go back still further, to an authority that has lost none of its prestige as centuries succeed centuries, the Old Testament abounds in biographies. Plutarch is the parent of biographical art. His _Lives of Famous Men_ is the source from which all later biography has flown. His conception of the art is the one we have to-day, save that he, like all other biographers of antiquity, sought to include an era in his studies. There was constant competition in the importance between his subjects as individuals, and the epochs in which these subjects lived. The tendency then was to put man a little in the shadow in order that his time might stand out clearly; as a result, biographies of olden times were more concerned with principles of truth and morals than with men; they were treatises through which the writer could expound his doctrines and principles. Soon, however, fortunately for the art under discussion, writers discovered that man alone is not big enough successfully to compete with his epoch, and in the Middles Ages, biographers realised that their task should be narrowly confined between two events: the birth and the death of their subject. Outside events, revolutions, and world affairs must be reduced to the point where they could not diminish the importance of the person whose biography was written. It was then that biographies became the sort of literature they are to-day. They grew more subjective, more personal, more deserving of the definition Thomas Fuller gives the art of biography: “To hand down to a future age the history of individual men or women, to transmit their exploits and characteristics.” The man as implicit self, explicit in action, the person and his personations, are what biography aims to depict.