All biography has been said to be eulogistic in its nature.  This is well enough.  But it is not well, when the author, high on daring stilts, overlooks the little matters just about him, and, rapidly running his eye over the wastes that stretch from Dan to Beersheba, prates of the fields that lie along the distant horizon.  Nor is it well, when he forgets his hero, and writes himself,—­when he constantly thrusts upon us philosophy, abstractions, and the like,—­when he has a pet theory to sustain through thick and thin,—­when narrative becomes disquisition, memoir is criticism, life is bloodless, and the man is a puppet whose strings he jerks freakishly.  There may be something good in all this; but it is all quite out of place:  it is simply not biography.  The foundation of most biographical sins is, perhaps, ambition,—­an ambition to do something more or something other than the subject demands, and to pitch the strain in too high a key.  Hence we have usually found the memoirs of comparatively insignificant men to be better reading, and more fertile in suggestion, than those of what are called great men.  Not that the real life, as he lived it, of a man of mediocrity has in itself more seeds of thought than that of a hero.  Far otherwise.  But his written life has often greater lessons of wisdom for us, precisely because it is generally found to give us more of the individual, and more of our common humanity,—­which is the very thing we want.  There is less of pretext to pour this one small drop into the broad ocean, and then treat us to a vague essay on salt-water.  What is it, for instance, that gives to Southey’s “Life of Nelson” its great excellence?  There have been many other works on the same subject, larger, fuller, and more carefully studied.  But these will perish, while that will be cherished by all the generations to come.  It is because the author kept throughout precisely on a level with his subject.  He was conscious, on every page, that he was writing of one man,—­that nothing was trivial which could throw light on this man, and nothing important which did not tend directly to the same end.  Nelson was made to speak, not only in his own words, but in the many little ways and actions which best show the stuff one is made of.  There is no essay, nothing strictly didactic.  Facts are given:  inferences are left entirely with the reader.  Few books are more wearisome than those which are thoroughly exhaustive, which point a moral and adorn a tale on every page.  Imagination and thought must sit supine, despairing of new conquests.  Their work has all been done before.

Christopher North—­Heaven be praised!—­was not an “historic force.”  He was a good many things, but not that.  And so it was always pleasant to read him and about him.  He was so completely vital and individual, that nothing that concerned him ever lacked in human interest.  The world has known him for a long time, and has lost nothing by the acquaintance.  Latterly it has