felt the joys and sorrows, and experienced the difficulties and
triumphs, of real life, is capable of being made more attractive,
than the most perfect fictions ever woven, it is remarkable that
so few men of genius have been attracted to the composition of
works of this kind. Great works of fiction abound, but great
biographies may be counted on the fingers. It may be for the same
reason that a great painter of portraits, the late John Philip,
R.A., explained his preference for subject-painting, because, said
he, "Portrait-painting does not pay." Biographic portraiture
involves laborious investigation and careful collection of facts,
judicious rejection and skilful condensation, as well as the art
of presenting the character portrayed in the most attractive and
lifelike form; whereas, in the work of fiction, the writer's
imagination is free to create and to portray character, without
being trammelled by references, or held down by the actual details
of real life.

There is, indeed, no want among us of ponderous but lifeless
memoirs, many of them little better than inventories, put together
with the help of the scissors as much as of the pen. What
Constable said of the portraits of an inferior artist--"He takes
all the bones and brains out of his heads"--applies to a large
class of portraiture, written as well as painted. They have no
more life in them than a piece of waxwork, or a clothes-dummy at a
tailor's door. What we want is a picture of a man as he lived,
and lo! we have an exhibition of the biographer himself. We
expect an embalmed heart, and we find only clothes.

There is doubtless as high art displayed in painting a portrait in
words, as there is in painting one in colours. To do either well