either sentimental or of the
wicked fairy type, full of indomitable relish for life. In Shakespeare
they are shadowy and broken; in Wordsworth they relentlessly improve
the occasion. What one desires to see depicted is some figure that has
gained in gentleness and tolerance without losing, shrewdness and
perception; who is as much interested as ever in seeing the game
played, without being enviously desirous to take a hand. The thing is
so perfectly beautiful when it occurs in real life that it is hard to
see why it should not be represented.

XLV

I seem to remember having lately seen at the Zoo a strange and
melancholy fowl, of a tortoise-shell complexion, glaring sullenly from
a cage, with that curious look of age and toothlessness that eagles
have, from the overlapping of the upper mandible of the beak above the
lower; it was labelled the _Monkey-eating Eagle_. Its food lay untasted
on the floor; it much preferred, no doubt, and from no fault of its
own, poor thing, a nice, plump, squalling baboon to the finest of chops
without the fun!

But the name set me thinking, and brought to mind a very different kind
of creature, from whom I have suffered much of late, the _Eagle-eating
Monkey_ by which I mean the writer of bad books about great people. I
had personally always supposed that I would rather read even a poor
book about a real human being than the cleverest of books about
imaginary people; at least I thought so till I was obliged to read a
large number of memoirs and biographies, written some by stupid
painstaking people, and some by clever aggravating people, about a
number of celebrated persons.

The stupid book is tiresome enough, because it ends by making one feel
that there is a real human being whom one cannot get at behind all the
tedious paragraphs, like some one stirring and coughing behind a
screen--or even more like the outline of a human figure covered up with
a quilt, so that one can just infer which is the head and which the
feet, but with the outlines all overlaid with a woolly padded texture
of meaningless words. Such biographers as these are hardly eagle-eating
monkeys. They are rather monkeys who would eat a live eagle if they
could catch one, and will mangle a dead one if they can find him. The
marvel is that with material at their command, with friends of their
victim to interrogate, and sometimes even with a personal knowledge of
him, they can yet contrive to avoid telling one a