; nor does the biographer give undue prominence to the
defects of the character he portrays. Not many men are so outspoken
as Cromwell was when he sat to Cooper for his miniature: "Paint me
as I am," said he, "wart and all." Yet, if we would have a faithful
likeness of faces and characters, they must be painted as they are.
"Biography," said Sir Walter Scott, "the most interesting of every
species of composition, loses all its interest with me when the
shades and lights of the principal characters are not accurately and
faithfully detailed. I can no more sympathize with a mere eulogist
than I can with a ranting hero on the stage."

It is to be regretted that in this day the country is flooded with
cheap, trashy fiction, the general tendency of which is not only not
educational, but is positively destructive. The desire to read this
stuff is as demoralizing as the opium habit.

There are works of fiction, cheap and available, too, whose influence
is elevating, and some knowledge of which is essential to the young
man who is using his spare hours for the purpose of self-education.

There is no room for doubt that the surpassing interest which
fiction, whether in poetry or prose, possesses for most minds arises
mainly from the biographic element which it contains. Homer's "Iliad
"owes its marvelous popularity to the genius which its author
displayed in the portrayal of heroic character. Yet he does not so
much describe his personages in detail as make them develop
themselves by their actions. "There are in Homer," said Dr. Johnson,
"such characters of heroes and combination of qualities of heroes,
that the united powers of mankind ever since have not produced any
but what are to be found there."

The genius of Shakespeare, also, was displayed in the powerful
delineation of character, and the dramatic evolution of human
passions. His personages seem to be real--living and breathing
before us. So, too, with Cervantes, whose Sancho Panza, though
homely and vulgar, is intensely human. The characters in Le Sage's
"Gil Bias," in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," and in Scott's
marvelous muster-roll, seem to us almost as real as persons whom we
have actually known; and De Foe's greatest works are but so many
biographies, painted in minute detail, with reality so apparently
stamped upon every page that it is difficult to believe his Robinson
Crusoe and Colonel Jack to have been fictitious persons instead of
real ones.

Then