l. The recently
published memoirs by Imbert de St. Amand, of court life in France in the
times of Marie Antoinette, Josephine, Marie Louise, and other periods,
while hastily written and not always accurate, are lively and
entertaining.

The English people fall far behind the French in biographic skill, and
many of their memoirs are as heavy and dull as the persons whom they
commemorate. But there are bright exceptions, in the lives of literary
men and women, and in some of those of noted public men in church and
state. Thus, there are few books more enjoyable than Sydney Smith's
Memoirs and Letters, or Greville's Journals covering the period including
George IV to Victoria, or the Life and Letters of Macaulay, or Mrs.
Gaskell's Charlotte Bronte, or the memoirs of Harriet Martineau, or
Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson. Among the briefer biographies worthy of
special mention are the series of English Men of Letters, edited by John
Morley, and written by some of the best of contemporary British writers.
They embrace memoirs of Chaucer, Spenser, Bacon, Sidney, Milton, De Foe,
Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Locke, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Gray, Addison,
Goldsmith, Burke, Hume, Gibbon, Bunyan, Bentley, Sheridan, Burns, Cowper,
Southey, Scott, Byron, Lamb, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, De
Quincey, Macaulay, Landor, Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Carlyle.
These biographies, being quite compendious, and in the main very well
written, afford to busy readers a short-hand method of acquainting
themselves with most of the notable writers of Britain, their personal
characteristics, their relation to their contemporaries, and the quality
and influence of their works. Americans have not as yet illustrated the
field of biographic literature by many notably skilful examples. We are
especially deficient in good autobiographies, so that Dr. Franklin's
stands almost alone in singular merit in that class. We have an abundance
of lives of notable generals, professional men, and politicians, in which
indiscriminate eulogy and partisanship too often usurp the place of
actual facts, and the truth of history is distorted to glorify the merits
of the subject of the biography. The great success of General Grant's own
Memoirs, too, has led publishers to tempt many public men in military or
civil life, into the field of personal memoirs, not as yet with
distinguished success.

It were to be wished that more writers possessed of some literary skill