Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/11

 PREFACE

desire for information on the lives of our fellow-countrymen has grown apace during recent years. The announcement in the daily papers of the death of a contemporary known in any circle of life is at once followed by a much longer description of his career than would have been the case fifty years since. Famous Englishmen in all ages are chronicled in the pages of Sir George Murray Smith's costly Dictionary of national biography, and Mr. Frederic Boase in his noble volumes of Modern English biography has summarised, with patient and protracted labour, the lives of everyone of any importance who passed away in the half-century beginning with 1850. But even after this vast increase in the biographical literature of our country many persons conspicuous in their time still want a chronicler.

Biographical details of such men as David Garrick can be found in a score of separate memoirs and in the general dictionaries of the literature or the biography of our kingdom, but information on the career of the poetaster whose lines were engraved on Garrick's monument in Westminster Abbey can be looked for with certainty in one authority only. It is in the memoirs of the more obscure of our countrymen that the value of our great biographical dictionary lies, and even within its ample folds five out of the eight lives described in these pages are not to be found.

The three lives which are described in the pages of that Dictionary are those of bishop Rundle, Dr. Warner and John Taylor. In a work of such magnitude the memoirs are necessarily of limited compass and to each of them I have