No part of history is more instructive and delighting, than the lives of great and worthy men: the shortness of them invites many readers, and there are such little and yet remarkable passages in them, too inconsiderable to be put in a general history of the age in which they lived, that all people are very desirous to know them. This makes Plutarch's lives to be more generally read than any of all the books which the ancient Greeks or Romans writ.