Page:The Children's Plutarch, Greeks.djvu/13



T is more a pleasure than I can well say to write of this little book which Mr. Gould has made for the children out of Plutarch's great book. The work is very well done, indeed, with a feeling for the original and a faith in it which no criticism or research can ever quite dissipate; for in spite of all the knowledge of Greece and Rome which the study of scholars has since brought us, the Greece and Rome of Plutarch, which, for the English race, became the Greece and Rome of Shakespeare and of Goldsmith, will remain to the end of time the universal countries, with the “cities of the soul” for their capitals. As I read these wonder-stories which Mr. Gould has so simply, so clearly, so wisely retold, I shared again that stir and thrill of the heart which the Italian poet Alfieri records, with his fine frenzy: “The book of books for me, and the one which caused me to pass hours of bliss and rapture, was Plutarch, his lives of the truly great; and some of these, as Timoleon, Cæsar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and others, I read and read again with such a transport of cries, tears,