ential things in the training of a great writer is
the development of an upright, noble character. Milton was right in
maintaining that the great poet should make his life a noble poem. As a
rule the writers of the world's greatest classics have been men of
sincerity, truth, and honor. Such was the character of Plato, Vergil,
Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, and
many others. Our best American writers, almost without exception, have
been distinguished for moral worth. In men like Burns, Byron, and Heine,
the absence of a high moral purpose has detracted, in spite of their
unquestioned intellectual power, from the excellence of a large part of
their writings.

+20. Autobiographic Elements.+ Our knowledge is of two kinds: the first
comes from our own experience; the other, from the experience and
testimony of our fellow-men. Personal experience carries with it a
conviction and power that do not usually belong to the knowledge
received from the testimony of others. What we have experienced has
become a part of our lives. The writers of vitality and power are those
who draw largely on their individual resources,--the treasures of their
own experience. They write, not from the memory, but from the heart. If
they borrow from others, they assimilate the information, and thus
vitalize it before giving it out again.

The best part of our knowledge is that which comes to us through
experience and assimilation. It is a permanent possession. When an
author's experience, either in an ideal or a realistic form, is
introduced in his work, it becomes an interesting biographical element.
It presents a part of his life, and often it exhibits the transforming
and glorifying power of his genius. In the drama "She Stoops to
Conquer," for example, Goldsmith has turned to excellent account a
humiliating incident of his youth. His "Deserted Village" is full of
childhood reminiscences. Scott's poems and novels are in large measure
only an expansion of the mediaeval and other lore that he
enthusiastically collected in his youth and early manhood. George
Eliot's earlier novels are filled with the scenes and characters of her
early life; and Dickens's best novel, "David Copperfield," is largely
autobiographical. An author's best work--that which possesses the
greatest degree of interest and vitality--is generally that which
springs from the treasure of his deepest experience, and is the fullest
expression of hi