appreciated by a well-informed community. In them we can trace the effects
of mental operations to their proper sources; and by comparing our own
composition with that of those who have excelled in virtue, or with that
of those who have been sunk in the lowest depths of folly and vice, we are
enabled to select a plan of life that will at least afford
self-satisfaction, and guide us through the world in paths of morality.

Without a knowledge of the lives of the vile and abandoned, we should be
wholly incompetent to set an appropriate value upon the charms, the
excellence and the worth of those principles which have produced the
finest traits in the character of the most virtuous.

Biography is a telescope of life, through which we can see the extremes
and excesses of the varied properties of the human heart. Wisdom and
folly, refinement and vulgarity, love and hatred, tenderness and cruelty,
happiness and misery, piety and infidelity, commingled with every other
cardinal virtue or vice, are to be seen on the variegated pages of the
history of human events, and are eminently deserving the attention of
those who would learn to walk in the "paths of peace."

The brazen statue and the sculptured marble, can commemorate the greatness
of heroes, statesmen, philosophers, and blood-stained conquerors, who have
risen to the zenith of human glory and popularity, under the influence of
the mild sun of prosperity: but it is the faithful page of biography that
transmits to future generations the poverty, pain, wrong, hunger,
wretchedness and torment, and every nameless misery that has been endured
by those who have lived in obscurity, and groped their lonely way through
a long series of unpropitious events, with but little help besides the
light of nature. While the gilded monument displays in brightest colors
the vanity of pomp, and the emptiness of nominal greatness, the