The life of any man is more or less of a mystery to other men, and one who would write it effectively must have been intimate with him from his youth onward.  When the biography is that of a man of genius, the difficulty is greatly increased, even to the writer who has been his life-long familiar; for genius, by the necessity of its being, implies a departure in a variety of ways from the thoughts and rules of that regulated existence which is most favorable to the progress and welfare of men in the mass,—­at least, as these are generally understood.  But if the life-long intimacy be wanting in this instance, the task of the writer is the most difficult of all, and almost always a failure,—­save in some rare case, where the writer and his subject have been men of a similar stamp.

Few biographies are written by the life-intimates of the dead.  In most instances they are composed as tasks or duties by comparative strangers; or if now and then by the friends or associates of the subject, these are very likely the observers of only a part of his life, the seri studiorum of his latter or middle career, and unacquainted with that period when the strong lines of character are formed and the mental tendencies fixed.  Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” is considered one of the best performances of its kind in our language; but it is, after all, only half a biography, as it were.  We have the pensioned and petted life of the rough and contemptuous man of genius,—­whose great renown in English literature, by-the-by, is owing far more to that garrulous admirer of his than to his own works,—­but we have little or nothing about those days of study or struggle when he taught and flogged little boys, or felt all the contumely excited by his shabby habiliments, or knocked down his publisher, or slept at night with a hungry stomach on a bulkhead in the company of the poor poet Savage.  All the racier and stronger part of the man’s history is slurred over.  No doubt he would not encourage any prying into it, and neither cared to remember it himself nor wished others to do so.  He had a sensitive horror of having his life written by an ignorant or unfriendly biographer, and even spoke of the justice of taking such a person’s life by anticipation, as they tell us.  Others, feeling a similar horror, and some of them conscious of the enmities they should leave behind them, have themselves written the obscurer portions of their own lives, like Hume, Gibbon, Gifford, Scott, Moore, Southey.  These men must have felt, that, even at best, and with the fairest intentions, the task of the biographer is full of difficulties, and open to mistakes, uncertainties, and false conclusions without number.