Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/15



is now complete: we would say a few words in presenting it to the Public.

Next to History, in its larger sense, Biography is the most valuable and interesting record which Literature can offer to mankind. If the one presents us with the great drama of humanity in its entire action and full development, the other furnishes us with the innumerable and subordinate dramas of all the prominent actors on the world's stage. It is often only in the lives of individuals that we discover the secret springs and hidden causes of those mighty events which advance or retard the progress of man—which influence his destiny and revolutionize the world; and thus the rays of light emitted from individual Biography converge upon the page of History, and enable us to read it more clearly.

We do not deem any apology necessary for the appearance of a new English biographical work at the present moment. The subjects for Biography are ever increasing, but at no period has that increase been more rapid or important than now. Whatever stimulates the energies of an age, makes it fruitful in events and multiplies its actors. Sciences and arts are moving with an accelerated pace, and new discoveries and inventions are daily making their authors notable. Great political influences have, within a recent period, passed over the world, and are still agitating it. The wars in Europe and Asia, especially in the Crimea and India, have produced great men as suddenly as the exigencies that required them, and names unheard of one year were illustrious the next. Our most recent biographical works thus became prematurely deficient: we have stepped in to remove the defect.

While we have availed ourselves of all accessible sources of information, we have secured the independent treatment of every memoir. Facts and dates are the common property of all chroniclers, while the mode of dealing with subjects, and the light in which they are presented, will ever be affected by the minds of original thinkers.

The limits of the Work have necessitated the exclusion of names of minor importance. In the delicate and arduous duty of selection, both as regards the dead and the living, the importance of the individual has been our guide; though we have, where the claims were otherwise equal, given the preference to celebrities of our own nation.

J.F.W.