correspondence at Abbotsford can only speak on _a priori_ grounds. But
it is unlikely that the writer of these exemplary footnotes has made
many serious mistakes in compiling his text.

Man's perennial and pathetic curiosity about virtue has no more
striking example than the public eagerness to be acquainted with every
detail of Scott's life. For what, as a mere story, is that life?--a
level narrative of many prosperous years; a sudden financial crash;
and the curtain falls on the struggle of a tired and dying gentleman
to save his honor. Scott was born in 1771 and died in 1832, and all
that is special in his life belongs to the last six years of it. Even
so the materials for the story are of the simplest--enough, perhaps,
under the hand of an artist to furnish forth a tale of the length of
Trollope's _The Warden_. In picturesqueness, in color, in wealth of
episode and +peripeteia+, Scott's career will not compare for a
moment with the career of Coleridge, for instance. Yet who could
endure to read the life of Coleridge in six volumes? De Quincey, in an
essay first published the other day by Dr. Japp, calls the story of
the Coleridges "a perfect romance ... a romance of beauty, of
intellectual power, of misfortune suddenly illuminated from heaven, of
prosperity suddenly overcast by the waywardness of the individual."
But the "romance" has been written twice and thrice, and desperately
dull reading it makes in each case. Is it then an accident that
Coleridge has been unhappy in his biographers, while Lockhart
succeeded once for all, and succeeded so splendidly?

It is surely no accident. Coleridge is an ill man to read about just
as certainly as Scott is a good man to read about; and the secret is
just that Scott had character and Coleridge had not. In writing of the
man of the "graspless hand," the biographer's own hand in time grows