. I'll
tell you a man who would have made a magnificent biography--Lord Melbourne.
He had a great charm, and a certain whimsical and fantastic humour, which
made him do funny little undignified things, like a child. But every single
dictum of Melbourne's has got something original and graceful about
it--always full of good sense, never pompous, always with a delicious
lightness of touch. The only person who took the trouble to put down
Melbourne's sayings, just as they came out, was Queen Victoria--but then
she was in love with him without knowing it: and in the end he got stuck
into the heaviest and most ponderous of biographies, and is lost to the
world. Stale politics--there's nothing to beat them for dulness
unutterable!"

"But isn't it an almost impossible thing," I said, "to expect a man who is
a first-rate writer, with ambitions in authorship, to devote himself to
putting down things about some interesting person with the chance of their
never being published? Very few people would have sufficient
self-abnegation for that."

"That's true enough," said Father Payne, "and of course it is a risk--a man
must run the risk of sacrificing a good deal of his time and energy to
recording unimportant details, perhaps quite uselessly, but with this
possibility ahead of him, that he may produce an immortal book--and I grant
you that the infernal vanity and self-glorification of authors is a real
difficulty in the way."

He was silent for a minute or two, and then he said: "Now, I'll tell you
another difficulty, that at present people only want biographies of men of
affairs, of big performers, men who have done things--I don't want that. I
want biographies of people who wielded a charm of personality, even if they
didn't _do_ things--people, I mean, who deserve to live and to be
loved.--Those are the really puzzling figures a generation later, the men
who lived in an atmosphere of admiring and delighted friendship, radiating
a sort of enchanting influence, having the most extravagant things said and
believed about them by their friends, and yet never doing anything in
particular. People, I mean, like Arthur Hallam, whose letters and remains
are fearfully pompous and tiresome--and who yet had _In Memoriam_
written about him, and who was described by Gladstone as the most perfect
human being, physically, intellectually and morally, he had ever seen. Then
there is Browning's Domett--the prototype of Waring--and Keats's friend