d them, have themselves
written the obscurer portions of their own lives, like Hume, Gibbon,
Gifford, Scott, Moore, Southey. These men must have felt, that, even
at best, and with the fairest intentions, the task of the biographer
is full of difficulties, and open to mistakes, uncertainties, and
false conclusions without number.

The autobiographies are the best biographies. No doubt, self-love and
some cowardly sensitiveness will operate on a man in speaking of his
own doings; but all such drawbacks will still leave his narrative far
more trustworthy, as regards the truth of character, than that of any
other man: and this is more emphatically the case in proportion to
the genius of the writer; for genius is naturally bold and true, the
antipodes of anything like hypocrisy, and prone to speak out,--if it
were but in defiance of hatred or misrepresentation, even though the
better and more philosophic spirit were wanting. We should have
better and more instructive autobiographies, if distinguished men
were not deterred by the self-denying ordinance so generally
accepted, that it is not becoming in any one to speak frankly of
himself or his own convictions. We have no longer any of the strong,
wayward egotists,--the St. Augustines, the Montaignes, the Rousseaus,
the Mirabeaus, the Byrons; even the Cobbetts have died out. But the
Carlyles and the Emersons preserve amongst us still the evidences of
a stronger time.

There are two sorts of biographies, which may be described, in a
rough way, as biographies of thought and biographies of action. It
may not be a very difficult thing, perhaps, to write the life of a
politician or a general, or even of a statesman or a great soldier.
At any rate, the history of such a one is an easy matter, compared
with that of a mere man of thought, of a man of genius. In the former
case, we have the marked events, which are, as it were, the
stepping-stones of biography,--events belonging to the narrative of the
time,--and the individual receives a reflected light from many men
and things. Dates and facts make the task of statement or commentary
more easy to the writer, and his work more interesting to the general
reader. But the case of the mere thinker, the man of inaction, whose
sphere of achievement is for the most part a little room, and who
produces his effects in a great measure in silence or solitude, is a
very different one. The names of his publications, the dates of them,
the numbe