BIOGRAPHY

is an artistic representation, in a continuous and more or le detailed narrative, of the life and character of any particular person. Its main object, as now written, is portraiture, and its succe or failure depends upon the faithfulne or unfaithfulne of the image.. Plutarch was the prince of the biographers of ancient times, and in later times Boswell comes first. His Life of Johnson is the finest of our biographies. Johnson, Goldsmith, Atterbury, and Bunyan, and Scott’s Biographical Memoirs are all well known, as are Lockhart’s Scott, and Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, Schiller and Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, and Froude’s Life of Carlyle. his subject and his surroundings, and must follow him in his controversies and speculations, and must be capable of weighing his abilities as well as his private virtues in the balance.