of such men, for they were akin to their fellows: histories, too, should
be theirs, for they were allied to Nature, and fate, and law. They
jested; and Biography, smiling, seized her tablets. They embodied a
people; and Clio, pondering, opened the long scrolls of time.

All biography has been said to be eulogistic in its nature. This is well
enough. But it is not well, when the author, high on daring stilts,
overlooks the little matters just about him, and, rapidly running his
eye over the wastes that stretch from Dan to Beersheba, prates of the
fields that lie along the distant horizon. Nor is it well, when he
forgets his hero, and writes himself,--when he constantly thrusts upon
us philosophy, abstractions, and the like,--when he has a pet theory to
sustain through thick and thin,--when narrative becomes disquisition,
memoir is criticism, life is bloodless, and the man is a puppet whose
strings he jerks freakishly. There may be something good in all this;
but it is all quite out of place: it is simply not biography. The
foundation of most biographical sins is, perhaps, ambition,--an ambition
to do something more or something other than the subject demands, and
to pitch the strain in too high a key. Hence we have usually found the
memoirs of comparatively insignificant men to be better reading, and
more fertile in suggestion, than those of what are called great men. Not
that the real life, as he lived it, of a man of mediocrity has in itself
more seeds of thought than that of a hero. Far otherwise. But his
written life has often greater lessons of wisdom for us, precisely
because it is generally found to give us more of the individual, and
more of our common humanity,--which is the very thing we want. There is
less of pretext to pour this one small drop into the broad ocean, and
then treat us to a vague essay on salt-water. What is it, for instance,
that gives to Southey's "Life of Nelson" its great excellence? There
have been many other works on the same subject, larger, fuller, and more