r of them, the publisher's price for them, the critic's
opinion of them, are meagre facts for the biographer; and if the man
of genius be a man of quiet, sequestered life, the record of it will
be only the more uninteresting to the reader. It is only when
something painful has been suffered, something eccentric done and
misunderstood and denounced or derided, that the biography rouses the
languid interest of the public. Indeed, so imperfect and false are
the plan and style of the literary biographies, that such opprobria
are, as it were, necessary to them,--necessary stimulants of
attention, and necessary shades of what would otherwise be a
monotonous and ineffective picture; and thus the unlucky men of
letters suffer posthumously for the stupidity of others as well as
their faults or divergencies. When biographers have not facts, they
are not unwilling to make use of fallacies: they set down "elephants
for want of towns." Dean Swift is a case in point. Society has
avenged itself by calumniating the man who spat upon its hypocrisies
and rascalities; and to appease the wounded feelings of the world, he
is attractively set down as a savage and a tyrant. Mr. Thackeray and
others find such a verdict artistically suitable to their criticisms
or their narratives, (a French author has written a romantic book
about the Dean and Stella,) and so the man is still depicted and
explained as the slayer of two poor innocent women, a sort of
clerical Bluebeard, and the horrid ogre who proposed to kill and eat
the fat Irish babies. Thackeray's plan of dissertation, indeed, was
inconsistent with any displacing or disturbing of the preconceived
notions; the success of it was, on the contrary, to be built upon the
customary old impressions of the subject. Everybody is pleased to
find his own idea in Thackeray, liking it all the better for the
graphic way in which it is set forth and illustrated; and the result
shows the shrewd artistic judgment of the critic, who apparently
(especially in the Dean's case) understands his readers rather better
than his theme. As for Swift,--though a fair knowledge of the man may
be gleaned from the several biographies of him that we have, his life
has not yet been fairly written and interpreted; and we believe the
same may be said of most literary men of genius.

It must certainly be said of Shelley,--and this brings us to the
beginning of our remarks. Not one man in ten thousand would be
capable of writin