and aid of biography and anecdote. A
word brings the individual before us, and shows not only his
character, but the character of the times, and at once illustrates
or condemns to everlasting fame. Macaulay has proved by example how
false Madame de Stael's principle was that biography and
biographical anecdotes were altogether inadmissible in
history--below the dignity or breaking the proportion or unity, I
suppose she thought. But whatever might be her reasons, she gave
this opinion to Dumont, who told it to me. Much good it did her!
How much more interesting historical _precis_ in painting or in
writing, which is painting in word, are made by the introduction of
portraits of celebrated individuals! Either as actors or even as
spectators, the bold figures live, and merely by their life further
the action and impress the sense of truth and reality. I have
pleasure, my dear Dr. Holland, in pointing out to you, warm as it
first comes, the admiration which this work has raised to this
height in my mind. I know this will give you sympathetic pleasure.

And now, my good friend, in return I require from you prompt and
entire belief in an assertion which I am about to make, which may
appear to you at first incredible. But try-try; at all events the
effort will give you occasion to determine a question which
perhaps, excellent metaphysician as you have shown yourself, you
never settled whether you can or cannot believe at will.

That which I require you to believe [the figure of a hand pointing
right appears here] is that all the admiration I have expressed of
Macaulay's work is quite uninfluenced by the self-satisfaction,
vanity, pride, surprise, delight, I had in finding my own name in a
note!!!!!

Be assured, believe it or not as you may or can, that neither my
vanity nor my gratitude weighed with my judgment in the slightest
degree in the opinion I formed, or in that warmth with which it was
poured out. In fact, I had formed my opinion, and expressed it with
no less warmth to my friends round me, reading the book to me,
before I came to that note; moreover, there was a mixture of shame
and twinge of pain with the pleasure, the pride I felt in having a
line in his immortal history given to _me_, when the historian
makes no mention of Sir Walter S