Translated from the French by
FREDERIC TABER COOPER
with illustrations from photographs
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1914 by Frederick A. Stokes Company
Of all the books perhaps the one best designedfor training the mind and forming the character is "Plutarch." Thelives of great men are object-lessons. They teach effort, devotion,industry, heroism and sacrifice.
Even one who confines his reading solely tobiographies of thinkers, writers, inventors, poets of the spirit orpoets of science, will in a short time have acquired anunderstanding of the whole History of Humanity.
And what novel or what drama could be comparedto such a history? Accurate biographies record narratives which noromancer's imagination could hope to rival. Researches, sufferings,labors, triumphs, agonies and disasters, the defeats of destiny,glory, which is the "sunlight of the dead," illuminating the past,whether fortunate or tragic,—such is what the lives of GreatMen reveal to us, or, if the phrase be allowed, paint for us in aseries of fascinating and dramatic pictures.
This series of biographies is accordinglyintended to form a sort of gallery, a museum of the great servantsof Art, Science, Thought and Action.
It was Emerson who wrote a volume devoted to theRepresentatives of Humanity. Here we have still another collectionof "Representative Men." This collection of profoundly interestingstudies is entrusted to the care of two writers, Mr. Albert Keimand Mr. Louis Lumet, both of whom have already earned theirlaurels, the former as poet, novelist, playwright, historian andphilosopher, and author of a definitive work upon Helvetius whichdeserves to become a classic, and the latter as publicist, artcritic and scholar of rare and profound erudition. An acquaintancewith the successive volumes in this series will give ample evidenceof the value of such able collaborators.
On the mountain tops we breathe a purer and morevivifying air. And it is like ascending to a moral mountain topwhen we live, if only for a moment, with the dead who, in theirlives did honour to mankind, and attain the level of those whoseeyes now closed, once glowed like beacon-lights, leading humanityon its eternal march through night-time towards the light.