s in my books: the record there,
A truthful photograph, is all I choose
To give the world of self; nor will excuse
Mine own or others' failures: glad to spare
From blame of mine, or praise, both friends and foes,
Leaving unwritten what God only knows."

In fact I always rejected the proposal (warned by recent volumes of
pestilential reminiscences) and would none of it; not only from its
apparent vainglory as to the inevitable extenuation of one's own faults
and failures in life, and the equally certain amplification of
self-registered virtues and successes,--but even still more from the
mischief it might occasion from a petty record of commonplace troubles
and trials, due to the "changes and chances of this mortal life," to the
casual mention or omission of friends or foes, to the influence of
circumstances and surroundings, and to other revelations--whether
pleasant or the reverse--of matters merely personal, and therefore more
of a private than a public character.

Indeed, so disquieted was I at the possible prospect of any one getting
hold of a mass of manuscript in old days diligently compiled by myself
from year to year in several small diaries, that I have long ago
ruthlessly made a holocaust of the heap of such written self-memories,
fearing their posthumous publication; and in this connection let me now
add my express protest against the printing hereafter of any of my
innumerable private letters to friends, or other MSS., unless they are
strictly and merely of a literary nature.

Biography, where honest and true, is no doubt one of the most
fascinating and instructive phases of literature; but it requires a
higher Intelligence than any (however intimate) friend of a man to do it
fairly and fully; so many matters of character and circumstance must
ever be to him unknown, and therefore will be by him unrecorded. And
even as to autobiography, who, short of the Omniscient Himself, can take
into just account the potency of outward surroundings, and still more of
inborn hereditary influences, over both mind and body? the bias to good
or evil, and the possession or otherwise of gifts and talents, due very
much (under Providence) to one's ancient ancestors and one's modern
teachers? We are each of us morally and bodily the psychical and
physical composite of a thousand generations. Albeit every individual
possesses as his birthright a freewill to turn either to the right or to
the left, and is