Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/13

Rh as she deemed right and advisable to be given to the world; all the reset she burned, so that no human eye but her own might look upon them, and when she had completed the book before us she further destroyed all papers and documents connected with the making of it. Thus it comes about that this biography is the only authoritative biography of Sir Richard Burton, and it is the only possible biography which can make any pretence to completeness. As such it must stand for all time. Other lives may be written of him, but this book must remain as the only biography based upon authentic documents prepared to some extent by himself, and written from authoritative sources of information. What is not here is not in existence; for the private journals and diaries which were full of the secret thoughts and apologia of this rare genius have been committed to the flames, and both he who wrote, and she who alone read them, have passed into the Great Silence.

I have said that the only person who could have written Burton's life was Burton himself; but failing him there was no one so worthy to undertake this take as his devoted wife, whose love had encompassed him night and day for thirty years, and who, after his death, guarded his good memory and fair name against all the world. If Lady Burton lacked some of the qualities of an ideal biographer, she compensated for the want by the zeal and devotion which inspired her in her task. She has given to the world a human document indeed, a vivid word-portrait of the man as she knew him, and none knew him in the latter part of his life better than she, and none had acquired greater opportunities for knowing all there was to be known about him in the days before he had crossed her path.

Burton was forty years of age when he made his romantic marriage with Isabel Arundell. His hot youth was over; the days of his most daring adventures and hair-breadth escapes were gone as a tale that is told; more than half his life had passed, and that the wildest and most eventful. After his marriage he settled down as well as he could into official harness, not very quietly at the best of times, but tame indeed compared with the Burt of Scinde, of Mecca, of Harar, of Central Africa and Salt Lake City. It is not