nded
directly for edification. Here the biographer was a moralist whose
hold upon exact truth of statement was very loose indeed, but who
was determined that every word he wrote should strengthen his
readers in the faith. Nor is this generation of biographers dead
today. Half the lives of the great and good men, which are
published in England and America, are expanded tracts. Let the
biographer be tactful, but do not let him be cowardly; let him
cultivate delicacy, but avoid its ridiculous parody, prudery.

And I also quote this from James Anthony Froude:

The usual custom in biography is to begin with the brightest side
and to leave the faults to be discovered afterwards. It is
dishonest and it does not answer. Of all literary sins, Carlyle
himself detested most a false biography. Faults frankly
acknowledged are frankly forgiven. Faults concealed work always
like poison. Burns' offenses were made no secret of. They are now
forgotten, and Burns stands without a shadow on him, the idol of
his countrymen.

Byron's diary was destroyed, and he remains and will remain with a
stain of suspicion about him, which revives and will revive, and
will never be wholly obliterated. "The truth shall make you free"
in biography as in everything else. Falsehood and concealment are a
great man's worst enemy.

* * * * *

Henry Ward Beecher was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June
Twenty-third, Eighteen Hundred Thirteen. He was the eighth child of
Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher. Like Lincoln and various other great
men, Beecher had two mothers: the one who gave him birth, and the one
who cared for him as he grew up. Beecher used to take with him on his
travels an old daguerreotype of his real mother, and in the cover of the
case, beneath the glass, was a lock of her hair--fair in color, and
bright as if touched by the kiss of the summer sun. Often he would take
this picture out and apostrophize it, just as he would the uncut gems
that he always carried in his pockets. "My first mother," he used to
call her; and to him she stood as a sort of deity. "My first mother
stands to me for love; my second mother for discipline; my father for
justice," he once said to Halliday.

I am not sure that Beecher had a well-defined idea of either discipline
or justice, but love to him was a very vivid and personal re