ell and good, nothing but right. And the plot
manifestly tended to a comic issue. But murder!--a Macbeth murder!--not
the injury so much as the man himself was incommensurate, was too slight
by a thousand degrees for so appalling a catastrophe. It reacts upon De
Montford, making _him_ ignoble that could be moved so profoundly by an
agency so contemptible.

Something of the same disproportion there is, though in a different way,
between any quarrel that may have divided us from a man in his life-time
and the savage revenge of pursuing the quarrel after his death through a
malicious biography. Yet, if you hated him through no quarrel, but
simply (as we all hate many men that died a thousand years ago) for
something vicious, or which you think vicious, in his modes of thinking,
why must you, of all men, be the one to undertake an edition of his
works, 'with a life of the author'? Leave that to some neutral writer,
who neither loves nor hates. And whilst crowds of men need better
biographical records whom it is easy to love and not difficult to
honour, do not you degrade your own heart or disgust your readers by
selecting for your exemplification not a model to be imitated, but a
wild beast to be baited or a criminal to be tortured? We privately hate
Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmsbury; we know much evil of him, and we could
expose many of his tricks effectually. We also hate Dean Swift, and upon
what we think substantial arguments. Some of our own contemporaries we
hate particularly; Cobbett, for instance, and other bad fellows in
fustian and corduroys. But for that very reason we will not write their
lives. Or, if we should do so, only because they might happen to stand
as individuals in a series, and after warning the reader of our own
bias. For it is too odious a spectacle to imprison a fellow-creature in
a book, like a stag in a cart, and turn him out to be hunted through all
his doubles for a day's amusement. It too much resembles that case of
undoubted occurrence both in France and Germany, where 'respectable'
individuals, simply as amateurs, and not at all with any view to the
salary or fees of operating, have come forward as candidates for the
post of public executioner. What is every man's duty is no man's duty by
preference. And unless where a writer is thrust upon such a duty by an
official necessity (as, if he contracts for a 'Biographia Britannica,'
in that case he is bound by his contract to go through with the wh