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.
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.