glish
biographer has long felt that, if in writing his man's biography he
wrote down anything that could by possibility offend any man, he had
written wrong.' The biographer, as Mr Froude found out for a commentary
on all this, is placed between a Scylla and Charybdis, between what is
due to the subject, and what is expected by the public. If something is
left out of the portrait, the likeness will be imperfect; if the anxiety
or the inquisitiveness of readers to know private details is left
ungratified, the writer will be met by the current cant that the public
has a right to know. The line is not easily drawn, and few subjects for
the biographer can ever desire to be as candidly dealt with by him as
Cromwell acted with Sir Peter Lely, in the request to be painted as he
was, warts and all. Thus, too often the result will be but biography
written _in vacuo_, 'the tragedy of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet
omitted--by particular desire.'

Biography, like History, has suffered from considerations of dignity and
propriety. The writers of the Hume and Robertson school of history, in
their stately minuet with the historical muse, have been careful to
exclude everything that seemed beneath the dignity of the sceptred pall;
biographers have as consciously studied the proprieties. 'The Muse of
history,' says Thackeray, 'wears the mask and speaks to measure; she too
in our age busies herself with the affairs only of kings. I wonder shall
history ever pull off her periwig and cease to be Court-ridden? I would
have History familiar rather than heroic, and think that Mr Hogarth and
Mr Fielding will give our children a much better idea of the manners of
the present age in England, than the _Court Gazette_ and the newspapers
which we get thence.' As the historian has striven to obscure the real
nature of the Grand Monarque, by confining his action to courts and
battlefields, so the biographer, in his desire of never stepping beyond
the proper, has enveloped his hero in a circle of correct ideas, after
the manner of George the Fourth and his multiplicity of waistcoats.
Dignity and respectability have ruined alike the historian and the
biographer.

Lockhart foresaw that some readers would accuse him of trenching upon
delicacy and propriety over his sixth and seventh chapters in the _Life
of Scott_, and the circumstances were after all such as, had choice been
permitted him, he might easily have omitted, considering it his duty to
tell