interest with me when the shades and lights of the principal
characters are not accurately and faithfully detailed. I can no
more sympathise with a mere eulogist, than I can with a ranting
hero on the stage." (7)

Addison liked to know as much as possible about the person and
character of his authors, inasmuch as it increased the pleasure
and satisfaction which he derived from the perusal of their books.
What was their history, their experience, their temper and
disposition? Did their lives resemble their books? They thought
nobly--did they act nobly? "Should we not delight," says Sir
Egerton Brydges, "to have the frank story of the lives and
feelings of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Campbell, Rogers,
Moore, and Wilson, related by themselves?--with whom they lived
early; how their bent took a decided course; their likes and
dislikes; their difficulties and obstacles; their tastes, their
passions; the rocks they were conscious of having split upon;
their regrets, their complacencies, and their self-
justifications?" (8)

When Mason was reproached for publishing the private letters of
Gray, he answered, "Would you always have my friends appear in
full-dress?" Johnson was of opinion that to write a man's life
truly, it is necessary that the biographer should have personally
known him. But this condition has been wanting in some of the
best writers of biographies extant. (9) In the case of Lord
Campbell, his personal intimacy with Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham
seems to have been a positive disadvantage, leading him to dwarf
the excellences and to magnify the blots in their characters.
Again, Johnson says: "If a man profess to write a life, he must