ridiculed by critics who aspire to the character of superior wisdom; but
if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an
incontestable proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper
of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read
history, how few derive any advantage from their labours! The heroes of
history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian;
they talk in such measured prose, and act from such sublime or such
diabolical motives, that few have sufficient taste, wickedness, or
heroism, to sympathize in their fate. Besides, there is much uncertainty
even in the best authenticated ancient or modern histories; and that
love of truth, which in some minds is innate and immutable, necessarily
leads to a love of secret memoirs and private anecdotes. We cannot judge
either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect
accuracy, from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from
their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may
hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real
characters. The life of a great or of a little man written by himself,
the familiar letters, the diary of any individual published by his
friends or by his enemies, after his decease, are esteemed important
literary curiosities. We are surely justified, in this eager desire, to
collect the most minute facts relative to the domestic lives, not only
of the great and good, but even of the worthless and insignificant,
since it is only by a comparison of their actual happiness or misery in
the privacy of domestic life that we can form a just estimate of the
real reward of virtue, or the real punishment of vice. That the great
are not as happy as they seem, that the external circumstances of
fortune and rank do not constitute felicity, is asserted by every
moralist: the historian can seldom, consistently with his dignity, pause
to illustrate this truth: it is therefore to the biographer we must have
recourse. After we have beheld splendid characters playing their parts