to be among
the most attractive specimens of literature in our language, or any
other.

The life of any man is more or less of a mystery to other men, and
one who would write it effectively must have been intimate with him
from his youth onward. When the biography is that of a man of genius,
the difficulty is greatly increased, even to the writer who has been
his life-long familiar; for genius, by the necessity of its being,
implies a departure in a variety of ways from the thoughts and rules
of that regulated existence which is most favorable to the progress
and welfare of men in the mass,--at least, as these are generally
understood. But if the life-long intimacy be wanting in this
instance, the task of the writer is the most difficult of all, and
almost always a failure,--save in some rare case, where the writer
and his subject have been men of a similar stamp.

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 behin