The autobiographies are the best biographies.  No doubt, self-love and some cowardly sensitiveness will operate on a man in speaking of his own doings; but all such drawbacks will still leave his narrative far more trustworthy, as regards the truth of character, than that of any other man:  and this is more emphatically the case in proportion to the genius of the writer; for genius is naturally bold and true, the antipodes of anything like hypocrisy, and prone to speak out,—­if it were but in defiance of hatred or misrepresentation, even though the better and more philosophic spirit were wanting.  We should have better and more instructive autobiographies, if distinguished men were not deterred by the self-denying ordinance so generally accepted, that it is not becoming in any one to speak frankly of himself or his own convictions.  We have no longer any of the strong, wayward egotists,—­the St. Augustines, the Montaignes, the Rousseaus, the Mirabeaus, the Byrons; even the Cobbetts have died out.  But the Carlyles and the Emersons preserve amongst us still the evidences of a stronger time.

There are two sorts of biographies, which may be described, in a rough way, as biographies of thought and biographies of action.  It may not be a very difficult thing, perhaps, to write the life of a politician or a general, or even of a statesman or a great soldier.  At any rate, the history of such a one is an easy matter, compared with that of a mere man of thought, of a man of genius.  In the former case, we have the marked events, which are, as it were, the stepping-stones of biography,—­events belonging to the narrative of the time,—­and the individual receives a reflected light from many men and things.  Dates and facts make the task of statement or commentary more easy to the writer, and his work more interesting to the general reader.  But the case of the mere thinker, the man of inaction, whose sphere of achievement is for the most part a little room, and who produces his effects in a great measure in silence or solitude, is a very different one.  The names of his publications, the dates of them, the number of them, the publisher’s price for them, the critic’s opinion of them, are meagre facts for the biographer; and if the man of genius be a man of quiet, sequestered life, the record of it will be only the more uninteresting to the reader.  It is only when something painful has been suffered, something eccentric done and misunderstood and denounced or derided, that the biography rouses the languid interest of the public.  Indeed, so imperfect and false are the plan and style of the literary biographies, that such opprobria are, as it were, necessary to them,—­necessary stimulants of attention, and necessary shades of what would otherwise be a monotonous and ineffective picture; and thus the unlucky men of letters suffer posthumously for the stupidity of others as well as their faults or divergencies.  When biographers have not facts, they are not unwilling to make use of fallacies: