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 as the great man himself, then dangers may be apprehended. Whether the secret of genius will ever be solved is for the future to determine. The biographer has no call to pursue speculation on the fascinating theme.

VI

Like all branches of modern literature, biography was efficiently practised by Greece and Rome, and it is to classical tuition that the modem art is deeply indebted. It was Amyot's great French translation of Plutarch which introduced the biography of disciplined purpose to the modem world, with lasting benefit to life and literature.

Plutarch's method is in one respect peculiar to himself. He endeavours to emphasise points of character and conduct in one man by instituting a formal comparison of them with traits of similar type in another man. He writes what he calls "parallel lives" of some twenty great Greeks and Romans. Having written of Alexander the Great, he