North's Plutarch
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared together by Plutarke. Translated out of Greeke into French by James Amyot: and out of French into Englishe by Thom0 North : the Illustrations by T. L. Poulton : with the fifteen supplementary Lives of 1603. Vol I. (The Nonesuch Presi. 30s.) FOR those unfamiliar with the works of Plutarch let it be said that living in the first century of our era he wrote parallel lives of great Greeks and Romans, giving in each case a full objective account of the virtues, vices, deeds, thOughts, suc- cesses and failures of the two men and then usually instituting
a formal comparison.
Fourteen centuries after his death Jacques Amyot, a learned and courtly French ecclesiastic, translated these Lives. He was impelled to do so by a laudable desire to extend human knowledge, especially through the medium of history. " We may well perceive," he says, as translated by North, " how greatly we be beholding unto it, if we doe no more but consider in how horrible darkenes and in how beastly and pestilent a quamyre of ignoraunce we should be plunged : if the remem- braunce of all the thinges that have bene done, and have happened before we were borne, were utterly drowned and forgotten."
To render even more remote so fearful a contingency he
decided to increase the facilities for such remembrance. In particular he considered, as was natural for the tutor of the
King's sons, that a study of the lives of the great leaders of old times was of peculiar value to " great Princes and Kings, bicause they have to do with charges of greatest weight ana difficultie, to be best stored with giftes and knowledge for tl‘e discharge of their dueties : seeing the ground of stories is, to treate of allmaner of /natters of state,.as warms, battells,
cities, contries, treaties- o- f peace and allianees.1'
.
He ventured too the opinion that Princes are not generally compelled to study so hard in their youth as the commoner sort and that when they grow up they tend to live in an atmosphere too rarefied to allow of familiar acquaintance with varied types of character and with people of foreign countries.
Thomas North,- who was of the same period as Amyot and equally imbued with the crusading spirit in the field of learning, declared of history that " all other learning is private, fitter for Universities than cities, fuller of contemplation than expe- rience, more commendable in the students them selves, than profitable unto others. Whereas stories are fit for every place, resale to all persons, serve for all tymes, teach the living, revive the dead."
But he has to be rather more careful than Amyot when it comes to the question of the peculiar utility of such history to Royalty. It would hardly have done for him, in the reign of Elizabeth, to suggest a Royal need either of translations of the classics or of the examples of earlier rulers. He hastens to remove any such impression, to anticipate the Queen's natural resentment of the attitude of Amyot and, perhaps, to hint at a favourable comparison between the. English and the French Court by writing in his dedication :-
"For, most gracious Sovereign, though this booke be no booke for yoUr Majesties selfe, who are meeter to-be the chiefe han a student therein, and can better understand it in Greek, than any man can make it Englishe : yet I hope the common 'Berta of your subjects, shall not onely profit them selves hereby, but also be animated to the better services of your Majestic)."
In so learned and courtly a manner were introduced to France and to England the lives of the Princes and Statesmen of old Greece and Rome, and in stately fashion are they now offered to twentieth-century England and America by the Nonesuch Press. For the five volumes, of which this is the first, the resources of no less than three printers have been enlisted. The text of this first volume, which is in Monotype Fournier, was printed in France, while Mr. T. L. Poulton's remarkable illustrations were printed by the Curwen Press. These illustra- tions consist of heads of the subjects of the different Lives set in the most intriguing designs often containing symbolic figures. The very large type used for the introductory matter is, oddly enough, not so easy or pleasant to read as the more normal Pica of the body of the book. Perhaps the eye, accus- tomed to dart from point to point in reading type, does not travel far enough to take in sufficient of the sense at one time. But even so slight a criticism as this seems out of place in con- sidering this book whose form is worthy of its content.
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