case of birds in cages, who, again, are compelled to die with
observation. The woodland is guarded and kept by a rule. There is no
display of the battlefield in the fields. There is no tale of the game-
bag, no boast. The hunting goes on, but with strange decorum. You may
pass a fine season under the trees, and see nothing dead except here and
there where a boy has been by, or a man with a trap, or a man with a gun.
There is nothing like a butcher's shop in the woods.

But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the wild
world. They will not have a man to die out of sight. I have turned over
scores of "Lives," not to read them, but to see whether now and again
there might be a "Life" which was not more emphatically a death. But
there never is a modern biography that has taken the hint of Nature. One
and all, these books have the disproportionate illness, the death out of
all scale.

Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortal
illness. If the man had recovered, his illness would have been rightly
his own secret. But because he did not recover, it is assumed to be news
for the first comer. Which of us would suffer the details of any
physical suffering, over and done in our own lives, to be displayed and
described? This is not a confidence we have a mind to make; and no one
is authorised to ask for attention or pity on our behalf. The story of
pain ought not to be told of us, seeing that by us it would assuredly not
be told.

There is only one other thing that concerns a man still more exclusively,
and that is his own mental illness, or the dreams and illusions of a long
delirium. When he is in common language not himself, amends should be
made for so bitter a paradox; he should be allowed such solitude as is