who profess a desire to hear nothing, or as little as may be, of the
lives of great artists, whether their instrument of art was the pen,
or the brush, or the chisel, or the strings and reeds of music.
With those critics perhaps most of us agree, when we read books that
gossip about Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron. "Give us their
poetry," we say, "and leave their characters alone: we do not want
tattle about Claire and chatter about Harriet; we want to be happy
with 'The Skylark' or 'The Cloud.'" Possibly this instinct is
correct, where such a poet as Shelley is concerned, whose life, like
his poetry, was as "the life of winds and tides," whose genius,
unlike the skylark's, was more true to the point of heaven than the
point of home. But reflection shows us that on the whole, as Mr.
Thackeray says, a man's genius must be builded on the foundations of
his character. Where that genius deals with the mingled stuff of
human life--sorrow, desire, love, hatred, kindness, meanness--then
the foundation of character is especially important. People are
sometimes glad that we know so little of Shakespeare the man; yet
who can doubt that a true revelation of his character would be not
less worthy, noble and charming than the general effect of his
poems? In him, it is certain, we should always find an example of
nobility, of generosity, of charity and kindness and self-
forgetfulness. Indeed, we find these qualities, as a rule, in the
biographies of the great sympathetic poets and men of genius of the
pen--I do not say in the lives of rebels of genius, "meteoric poets"
like Byron. The same basis, the same foundations of rectitude, of
honour, of goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth, underlie the art
of Moliere, of Scott, of Fielding, and as his correspondence shows,
of Thackeray.

It seems probable that a complete biography of Thackeray will never