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A well written biography, like that of Dr. Johnson, by Boswell, Walter Scott, by Lockhart, or Charles Dickens, by Forster, gives the reader an insight into the history of the times they lived in, the social, political, and literary environment, and the impress of their famous writings upon their contemporaries. In the autobiography of Dr. Franklin, one of the most charming narratives ever written, we are taken into the writer's confidence, sympathize with his early struggles mistakes, and successes, and learn how he made himself from a poor boy selling ballads on Boston streets, into a leader among men, whom two worlds have delighted to honor. Another most interesting book of biography is that of the brothers William and Robert Chambers, the famous publishers of Edinburgh, who did more to diffuse useful knowledge, and to educate the people, by their manifold cheap issues of improving and entertaining literature, than was ever done by the British Useful Knowledge Society itself. The French nation has, of all others, the greatest genius for personal memoirs, and the past two centuries are brought far more vividly before us in these free-spoken and often amusing chronicles, than in all the formal histories. Among the most readable of these (comparatively few having been translated into English) are the Memoirs of Marmontel, Rousseau, Madame Remusat, Amiel, and Madame De Stal. The recently published memoirs by Imbert de St. Amand, of court life in France in the times of Marie Antoinette, .Josephine, Marie Louise, and other periods, while hastily written and not always accurate, are lively and entertaining. The English people fall far behind the French in biographic skill, and many of their memoirs are as heavy and dull as the persons whom they commemorate. But there are bright exceptions, in the lives of literary men and women, and in some
of those of noted public men in church and state. Thus, there are few books
more enjoyable than Sydney Smith's Memoirs and Letters, or Greville's Journals
covering the period including George IV to Victoria, or the Life and Letters of
Macaulay, or Mrs. Gaskell's Charlotte Bronte, or the memoirs of Harriet Martineau
or Boswell's Life of Dr. .Johnson. Among the briefer biographies worthy of
special mention are the series of English Men of Letters, edited by John Morley,
and written by some of the best of contemporary British writers.

They embrace memoirs of Chaucer, Spenser, Bacon, Sidney, Milton, De Foe,
Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Locke, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Gray, Addison, Goldsmith,
Burke, Hume, Gibbon, Bunyan, Bentley, Sheridan, Burns, Cowper, Southey,
Scott, Byron, Lamb, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, De Quincey,
Macaulay, Landor, Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Carlyle. These
biographies, being quite compendious, and in the main very well written, afford
to busy readers a short-hand method of acquainting themselves with most of
the notable writers of Britain, their personal characteristics, their relation to their
contemporaries, and the quality and influence of their works. Americans have not
as yet illustrated the field of biographic literature by many notably skilful
examples. We are especially deficient in good autobiographies, so that Dr.
Franklin's stands almost alone in singular merit in that class. We have an
abundance of lives of notable generals, professional men, and politicians, in
which indiscriminate eulogy and partisanship too often usurp the place of actual
facts, and the truth of history is distorted to glorify the merits of the subject of
the biography. The great success of General Grant's own Memoirs, too, has led
publishers to tempt many public men in military or civil life, into the field of
personal memoirs, not as yet with distinguished success.

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