How then does a man--be he good or bad--big or little--a philosopher
or a fribble--St. Paul or Horace Walpole--make his memoirs
interesting?

To say that the one thing needful is individuality, is not quite
enough. To be an individual is the inevitable, and in most cases the
unenviable, lot of every child of Adam. Each one of us has, like a tin
soldier, a stand of his own. To have an individuality is no sort of
distinction, but to be able to make it felt in writing is not only
distinction but under favouring circumstances immortality.

Have we not all some correspondents, though probably but few, from
whom we never receive a letter without feeling sure that we shall find
inside the envelope something written that will make us either glow
with the warmth or shiver with the cold of our correspondent's life?
But how many other people are to be found, good, honest people too,
who no sooner take pen in hand than they stamp unreality on every word
they write. It is a hard fate, but they cannot escape it. They may be
as literal as the late Earl Stanhope, as painstaking as Bishop Stubbs,
as much in earnest as the Prime Minister--their lives may be noble,
their aims high, but no sooner do they seek to narrate to us their
story, than we find it is not to be. To hearken to them is past
praying for. We turn from them as from a guest who has outstayed his
welcome. Their writing wearies, irritates, disgusts.

Here then, at last, we have the two classes of memoir writers--those
who manage to make themselves felt, and those who do not. Of the
latter, a very little is a great deal too much--of the former we can
never have enough.