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 We may question whether it existed, save in rare and accidental instances, until the 17th century. The personage described was, in earlier times, treated either from the philosophical or from the historical point of view. In the former case, rhetoric inevitably clouded the definiteness of the picture; the object was to produce a grandiose moral effect, to clothe the subject with all the virtues or with all the vices; to make his career a splendid example or else a solemn warning. The consequence is that we have to piece together unconsidered incidents and the accidental record of features in order to obtain an approximate estimate. We may believe, for instance, that a faithful and unprejudiced study of the emperor Julian, from the life, would be a very different thing from the impression left upon us by the passions of Cyril or of Theodoret. In considering what biography, in its pure sense, ought to be, we must insist on what it is not. It is not a philosophical treatise nor a polemical pamphlet. It is not, even, a portion of the human contemporary chronicle. Broad views are entirely out of place in biography, and there is perhaps no greater literary mistake than to attempt what is called the “Life and Times” of a man. In an adequate record of the “times,” the man is bound to sink into significance; even a “Life and Times” of Napoleon I. would be an impossible task. History deals with fragments of the vast roll of events; it must always begin abruptly and close in the middle of affairs; it must always deal, impartially, with a vast number of persons. Biography is a study sharply defined by two definite events, birth and death. It fills its canvas with one figure, and other personages, however great in themselves, must always be subsidiary to the central hero. The only remnant of the old rhetorical purpose of “lives” which clearer modern purpose can afford to retain is the relative light thrown on military or intellectual or social genius by the achievements of the selected subject. Even this must be watched with great care, lest the desire to illuminate that genius, and make it consistent, should lead the biographer to glose over frailties or obscure irregularities. In the old “lives” of great men, this is precisely what was done. If the facts did not lend themselves to the great initial thesis, so much the worse for them. They must be ignored or falsified, since the whole object of the work was to “teach a lesson,” to magnify a certain tendency of conduct. It was very difficult to persuade the literary world that, whatever biography is, it is not an opportunity for panegyric or invective, and the lack of this perception destroys our faith in most of the records of personal life in ancient and medieval times. It is impossible to avoid suspecting that Suetonius loaded his canvas with black in order to excite hatred against the Roman emperors; it is still more difficult to accept more than one page in three of the stories of the professional hagiographers. As long as it was a pious merit to deform the truth, biography could not hope to flourish. It appears to have originally asserted itself when the primitive instinct of sympathy began to have free play, that is to say, not much or often before the 17th century. Moreover, the peculiar curiosity which legitimate biography satisfies is essentially a modern thing; and presupposes our observation of life not unduly clouded by moral passion or prejudice.

Among the ancients, biography was not specifically cultivated until comparatively later times. The lost “Lives” of Critias were probably political pamphlets. We meet first with deliberate biography in Xenophon’s memoirs of Socrates, a work of epoch-making value. Towards the close of the 1st century, Plutarch wrote one of the most fascinating books in the world’s literature, his Parallel Lives of 46 Greeks and Romans. In later Greek, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana was written by Philostratus, who also produced a Lives of the Sophists. In the 3rd century, Diogenes Laertius compiled a Lives of the Philosophers, which is of greater interest than a Lives of the Sophists composed a hundred years later by Eunapius. Finally in the 10th century, Suidas added a biographical section to his celebrated Lexicon. In Latin literature, the earliest biography we meet with is the fragment of the Illustrious Men of Cornelius Nepos. Memoirs began to be largely written at the close of the Augustan age, but these, like the Life of Alexander the Great, by Q. Curtius Rufus, were rather historical than biographical. Tacitus composed a life of his father-in-law, Agricola; this is a work of the most elegant and stately beauty. Suetonius was the author of several biographical compilations, of which the Lives of the Twelve Caesars is the best-known; this was produced in the year 120. Marius Maximus, in the 4th century, continued the series of emperors down to Heliogabalus, but his work has not been preserved. The Augustan History, finished under Constantine, takes its place, and was concluded and edited by Flavius Vopiscus.

Biography hardly begins to exist in English literature until the close of the reign of Henry VIII. William Roper (1496–1578) wrote a touching life of his father-in-law, Sir Thomas More, and George Cavendish (1500–1561?), a memoir of Cardinal Wolsey which is a masterpiece of liveliness and grace. It is with these two works, both of which remained in manuscript until the 17th century, that biography in England begins. The lives of English writers compiled by John Bale (1495–1563) are much more primitive and slight. John Leland (d. 1552) and John Pits (1560–1616) were antiquaries who affected a species of biography. In the early part of the 17th century, the absence of the habit of memoir writing extremely impoverishes our knowledge of the illustrious authors of the age, of none of whom there are preserved such records as our curiosity would delight in. The absence of any such chronicle was felt, and two writers, Thomas Heywood and Sir Aston Cokayne, proposed to write lives of the poets of their time. Unfortunately they never carried their plans into execution. The pioneer of deliberate English biography was Izaak Walton, who, in 1640, published a Life of Donne, followed in 1651 by that of Sir Henry Wotton, in 1665 by that of Richard Hooker, in 1670 by that of George Herbert, and in 1678 by that of Dr Robert Saunderson. These five reprinted, under the title of Walton’s Lives, were not only charming in themselves, but the forerunners of a whole class of English literature. Meanwhile, Fuller was preparing his History of the Worthies of England, which appeared after his death, in 1662, and John Aubrey (1626–1697) was compiling his Minutes of Lives, which show such a perfect comprehension of the personal element that should underlie biography; these have only in our own days been completely given to the public. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), wrote a brilliant autobiography, first printed in 1764; that of Anne Harrison, Lady Fanshawe (1625–1680), remained unknown until 1829. A very curious essay in biography is the memoir of Colonel John Hutchinson, written by his widow, Lucy, between 1664 and 1671. Margaret Lucas, duchess of Newcastle (1624?–1674), wrote her own life (1656) and that of her duke (1667). The Athenae Oxonienses of Anthony à Wood (1632–1695) was a complicated celebration of the wit, wisdom and learning of Oxford notabilities since the Reformation. In 1668 Thomas Sprat (1635–1713) wrote a Life of Cowley, which was very much admired and which exercised for many years a baneful influence on British biography. Sprat considered that all familiar anecdote and picturesque detail should be omitted in the composition of a memoir, and that moral effect and a solemn vagueness should be aimed at. The celebrated funeral orations of Jeremy Taylor were of the same order of eloquence, and the wind of those grandiose compositions destroyed the young shoot of genuine and simple biography which had budded in Walton and Aubrey.

From this time forth, for more than half a century, English biography became a highly artificial and rhetorical thing, lacking all the salient features of honest portraiture. William Oldys (1696–1761) was the first to speak out boldly; in 1747, in the preface to the Biographia Britannica, he pointed out “the cruelty, we might even say the impiety, of sacrificing the glory of great characters to trivial circumstances and mere conveniency,” and attacked the timid and scrupulous superficiality of those who undertook to write lives of eminent men, while omitting everything which gave definition to the portrait. In 1753 the Lives of the Poets, which bore the name of Theophilus Cibber (1703–1758), but was mainly written by Robert Shiels