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SELF-CHARACTERS.

There are two species of minor biography which may be discriminated; detailing our own life and portraying our own character.  The writing our own life has been practised with various success; it is a delicate operation, a stroke too much may destroy the effect of the whole.  If once we detect an author deceiving or deceived, it is a livid spot which infects the entire body.  To publish one’s own life has sometimes been a poor artifice to bring obscurity into notice; it is the ebriety of vanity, and the delirium of egotism.  When a great man leaves some memorial of his days, the grave consecrates the motive.  There are certain things which relate to ourselves, which no one can know so well; a great genius obliges posterity when he records them.  But they must be composed with calmness, with simplicity, and with sincerity; the biographic sketch of Hume, written by himself, is a model of Attic simplicity.  The Life of Lord Herbert is a biographical curiosity.  The Memoirs of Sir William Jones, of Priestley, and of Gibbon, offer us the daily life of the student; and those of Colley Cibber are a fine picture of the self-painter.  We have some other pieces of self-biography, precious to the philosopher.[A]

[Footnote A:  One of the most interesting is that of Grifford, appended to his translation of Juvenal; it is a most remarkable record of the struggles of its author in early life, told with candour and simplicity.—­ ED.]

The other species of minor biography, that of portraying our own character, could only have been invented by the most refined and the vainest nation.  The French long cherished this darling egotism; and have a collection of these self-portraits in two bulky volumes.  The brilliant Flechier, and the refined St. Evremond, have framed and glazed their portraits.  Every writer then considered his character as necessary as his preface.  The fashion seems to have passed over to our country; Farquhar has drawn his character in a letter to a lady; and others of our writers have given us their own miniatures.

There was, as a book in my possession will testify, a certain verse-maker of the name of Cantenac, who, in 1662, published in the city of Paris a volume, containing some thousands of verses, which were, as his countrymen express it, de sa facon, after his own way.  He fell so suddenly into the darkest and deepest pit of oblivion, that not a trace of his memory would have remained, had he not condescended to give ample information of every particular relative to himself.  He has acquainted us with his size, and tells us, “that it is rare to see a man smaller than himself.  I have that in common with all dwarfs, that if my head only were seen, I should be thought a large man.”  This atom in creation then describes his oval and full face; his fiery and eloquent eyes:  his vermil lips; his robust constitution, and his effervescent passions.  He appears to have been a most petulant, honest, and diminutive being.