There is, doubtless, a great deal to be taught by biography; but it is by the mistakes of men that we learn, and not by their weaknesses.  To see clearly an error of judgment and its consequences may be of positive service to us in the conduct of life, while a vice of temperament concerns us not at all in private men, and only so far in statesmen and rulers as it may have been influential in history as a modifier of action, or is essential to an understanding of it as an explainer of motive.

The Autobiography of Leslie seems to us in some sort the complement of Haydon’s, and throws the defiant struggle of that remarkable self-portraiture into stronger relief by the contrast of its equable good-fortune and fireside tranquillity.  The causes of the wide difference in the course and the result of these two lives are on the surface and are instructive.  Comparing the two men at the outset, we should have said that all the chances were on Haydon’s side.  If he had not genius, he had at least the temperament and external characteristics that go along with it.  He had what is sometimes wanting to it in its more purely aesthetic manifestation, the ambition that spurs and the unflagging energy that seemed a guerdon of unlimited achievement.  Yet the ambition fermented into love of notoriety and soured into a fraudulent self-assertion, that grew boastful as it grew distrustful of its claims and could bring less proof in support of them; the energy degenerated into impudence, evading the shame of spendthrift bankruptcy to-day by shifts that were sure to bring a more degrading exposure tomorrow; and the whole ended at last in a suicide whose tragic pang is deadened to us by the feeling that so much of the mixed motive that drove him to it as was not cowardice was a hankering after melodramatic effect, the last throb of a passion for making his name the theme of public talk, and his fate the centre of a London day’s sensation.  Chatterton makes us lenient to a life of fraud by the dogged and cynical uncomplainingness of the despair that drove him to cut it short; but Haydon continues his self-autopsy to the last moment, and in pulling the trigger seems to be only firing the train for an explosion that shall give him a week longer of posthumous notoriety.  The egotism of Pepys was but a suppressed garrulity, which habitual caution, fostered by a period of political confusion and the mystery of office, drove inward to a kind of soliloquy in cipher; that of Montaigne was metaphysical,—­in studying his own nature and noting his observations he was studying man, and that with a singular insouciance of public opinion; but Haydon appears to have written his journals with a deliberate intention of their some day advertising himself, and his most private aspirations are uttered with an eye to the world.  Yet it was a genuine instinct that led him to the pen, and his lifelong succession of half-successes that are worse than defeats was due to the initial error of mistaking a passion