difficulty,--that while minute details of conduct, favourable or
otherwise, can best be given from personal knowledge, they cannot always
be published, out of regard for the living; and when the time arrives
when they may at length be told, they are then no longer remembered.
Johnson himself expressed this reluctance to tell all he knew of
those poets who had been his contemporaries, saying that he felt as if
"walking upon ashes under which the fire was not extinguished."

For this reason, amongst others, we rarely obtain an unvarnished
picture of character from the near relatives of distinguished men; and,
interesting though all autobiography is, still less can we expect it
from the men themselves. In writing his own memoirs, a man will not tell
all that he knows about himself. Augustine was a rare exception, but
few there are who will, as he did in his 'Confessions,' lay bare their
innate viciousness, deceitfulness, and selfishness. There is a Highland
proverb which says, that if the best man's faults were written on his
forehead he would pull his bonnet over his brow. "There is no man," said
Voltaire, "who has not something hateful in him--no man who has not some
of the wild beast in him. But there are few who will honestly tell us
how they manage their wild beast." Rousseau pretended to unbosom himself
in his 'Confessions;' but it is manifest that he held back far more
than he revealed. Even Chamfort, one of the last men to fear what his
contemporaries might think or say of him, once observed:--"It seems to
me impossible, in the actual state of society, for any man to exhibit
his secret heart, the details of his character as known to himself, and,
above all, his weaknesses and his vices, to even his best friend."

An autobiography may be true so far as it goes; but in communicating
only part of the truth, it may convey an impression that is really
false. It may be a disguise--sometimes it is an apology--exhibiting
not so much what a man really was, as what he would have liked to be. A
portrait in profile may be correct, but who knows whether some scar on
the off-cheek, or some squint in the eye that is not seen, might not
have entirely altered the expression of the face if brought into sight?
Scott, Moore, Southey, all began autobiographies, but the task of
continuing them was doubtless felt to be too difficult as well as
delicate, and they were abandoned.

French literature is especially rich in a class of biogra