e, and the advocacy of a special counsel retained by
the prisoner, expresses the difference which we contemplate between the
biographer as he has hitherto protected his hero and that biographer
whom we would substitute. Is he not to show a partiality for his
subject? Doubtless; but hitherto, in those lives which have been
farthest from _eloges_, the author has thought it his duty to uphold the
general system, polity, or principles upon which his subject has acted.
Thus Middleton and all other biographers of Cicero, whilst never
meditating any panegyrical account of that statesman, and oftentimes
regretting his vanity, for instance, have quite as little thought it
allowable to condemn the main political views, theories, and
consequently actions, of Cicero. But why not? Why should a biographer be
fettered in his choice of subjects by any imaginary duty of adopting the
views held by him whose life he records? To make war upon the man, to
quarrel with him in every page, _that_ is quite as little in accordance
with our notions; and we have already explained above our sense of its
hatefulness. For then the question recurs for ever: What necessity
forced you upon a subject whose conduct you thoroughly disapprove? But
let him show the tenderness which is due to a great man even when he
errs. Let him expose the _total_ aberrations of the man, and make this
exposure salutary to the pathetic wisdom of his readers, not alimentary
to their self-conceit, by keeping constantly before their eyes the
excellence and splendour of the man's powers in contrast with his
continued failures. Let him show such patronage to the hero of his
memoir as the English judge showed to the poor prisoner at his bar,
taking care that he should suffer no shadow of injustice from the
witnesses; that the prisoner's own self-defence should in no part be
defeated of its effect by want of proper words or want of proper skill
in pressing the forcible points on the attention of the jury; but
otherwise leaving him to his own real merits in the facts of his case,
and allowing him no relief from the pressure of the hostile evidence but
such as he could find either in counter-evidence or in the intrinsic
weight of his own general character. On the scheme of biography there
would be few persons in any department of life who would be accompanied
to the close by a bowing and obsequious reporter; there would be far
less of uniform approbation presumable in memoirs; but, on