Those who remember the excellent judgment with which Mr. Taylor selected his material for the Autobiography of Haydon from the papers left by that artist need not be told that this work is executed with spirit and discrimination.  It is a delicate task to publish just so much of the letters and reminiscences of a man lately dead as shall consist with good taste and gentlemanly feeling, to discriminate between legitimate anecdote and what at second-hand becomes tale-bearing gossip, and not to break faith with the dead by indiscreet confidences about the living.  If the dead have any privilege, it ought to be that of holding their tongues; yet an unseemly fashion has prevailed lately of making them gabble for years in Diaries, Remains, Correspondences, and Recollections, perpetuating in a solid telltale record all they may have said and written thoughtlessly or in a momentary pet, giving to a fleeting whim the printed permanence of a settled opinion, and robbing the grave of what is sometimes its only consoling attribute, the dignity of reserve.  We know of no more unsavory calling than this, unless it be that of the Egyptian dealers in mummy, peddling out their grandfathers to be ground into pigment.  Obsequious to the last moment, the jackal makes haste to fill his belly from the ribs of his late lion almost before he is cold.

Mr. Taylor is too manly and well-bred to be guilty of any indiscretions, much more of any indecencies.  He let Haydon tell his own story, nor assumed the function of a judge.  And wisely, as we think; for, commonly, when men take it upon themselves uncalled, their inability to conceive the special weakness that is not theirs, (and which, perhaps, was but the negative of a strength equally alien to them.) their humanly narrow and often professionally back-attic view of character and circumstance, their easy after-dinner superiority to what was perhaps a loathing compromise with famine and the jail, fit them rather for the office of advocatus diaboli than of the justice which must be all-seeing that it may be charitable.  It is so hard to see that a sin is sometimes but a thwarted and misdirected virtue!  When Burns sighed that “the light that led astray was light from Heaven,” he was but unconsciously repeating what a poet who of all men least needed the apology had said centuries before.

We do not admit, that, because a man has published a volume or a picture, he has published himself, excommunicated his soul from the sanctuary of privacy, and made his life as common as a tavern-threshold to every blockhead in the parish,—­or that any Pharisee who kept carefully to windward of his virtues, out of the way of infection, has thereby earned the right to mismoralize his failings after he is dumbly defenceless.  The moral compasses that are too short for the aberration may be, must be, unequal to the orbit.  We would not deny that Burns was a chamberer and a drunkard because he was a great poet; but we would not admit