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to the biographer in the use of personal anecdotes and reflections when dealing with a subject in which character is a primary element than when dealing with one in which it is only secondary.

Unfortunately it is not always possible or easy to draw the line between the two classes. There are men in the world who, while charged with the performance of great public duties, are also expected to set examples of righteous living and just and charitable dealing. As is only to be expected, however, they seldom combine the two sets of qualifications in an equal degree; and where the man of action decidedly predominates over the man of thought, standing before the world rather as a great administrator, ruler, and orator, than as a great religious teacher or spiritual guide, the biographer will adopt the rules which apply to the former rather than those which we have indicated as appropriate to the latter. There is no more to be said on this point. But there is a final warning to be given which is applicable to all biographies alike. It is contained in the legal maxim sic utere tuo ut alienum non lædas. Hitherto we have considered the biographer's task solely in relation to his subject. But we cannot dismiss the question without referring to the interests of third parties which seem to be totally disregarded by many biographers of the present day. The author has even less right to publish matter which reflects on the characters of other people than such as concerns his own hero only, since he may be supposed to be in some sort the depositary and representative of his intentions, and to be acquainted with his wishes in regard to posthumous revelations. There is too much reason to believe that in very many cases he is not; but still the presumption. is necessarily in his favour. Not so, however, with regard to those persons who are introduced into his pages without any consent of their own, given or implied. Of their names he is bound to be peculiarly tender, especially when he knows nothing of their character except what he finds among the papers of the deceased, and cannot therefore check the impressions which these may be calculated to create by any independent or external criterion. These remarks do not, of course, apply exclusively to biography. Memoirs, diaries, reminiscences, collections of letters, are all more or less open to the same criticism. But the biographer is the more exposed to the particular temptation in question, because in biography hero worship has its freest scope; and as it naturally tends to magnify the importance of every circumstance connected with the hero, so it easily engenders a belief that nothing can be wrong which adds one iota to our stock of information on the subject. We hope we have shown that this belief is erroneous; that the highest ends to which biography can be dedicated are often attainable without the use of such means as we have here been considering; and that even where these are essential they often, in unskilful hands, become the medium of conveying to the reader impressions which are wide of the truth, and of substituting, in short, for what ought to be a portrait, a worthless and clumsy caricature.

From a Garret.

AT first sight the garret might not perhaps seem an attractive spot: it is dark, low, and quiet, with sundry corners, from which darkness is never absent, and where at twilight strange forms appear to loiter, as if they were emerging slowly and reluctantly from the bosom of the past. It requires an adventurous soul to climb the worn steps that lead from the nursery floor, and a wary eye, else surely will your head come sharply against the rafters that are close above; and the stoutest heart quails a little as the owner leaves the light and noise and merriment of the household, and wanders up the staircase into what is essentially a museum of long-forgotten curiosities, a storehouse of long dead days. It were best to come first to our garret just before the setting of the sun on some fair evening in late summer, and shutting the door as closely as the loosely falling latch will allow, draw up the old elbow chair we love, and opening the stiff casement, warily lest we should shake out the diamondpanes of glass, lean out just a little and look silently at the scene.

All round the garret window climbs the red virginian creeper, brought hither from the wife's old home, and tended with much care until it could fend for itself, and became quite a vast creeper, embellishing in less time than it took the eldest child to grow from long frocks into short ones, and then into long ones again, all the gable-end of the house, and peeping thus into the highest window, became one of the associations with the past with which the garret is crowded. Indeed, were it now left to its own devices, it would form a complete veil over our own window, which is often tapped at emphatically by its long tendrils as if they wanted to shelter from the wind outside; and many times have we snapped them off unconsciously, not seeing they had put their feelers in at the hinges. But we will not lose our sunset view, even to keep out the present day of rush and hurry; and so, like most other things, the creeper has to remain duly within bounds, at all events as long as we have the management of it.

It seems the first hint of the sunset in autumn with its glowing red and faded yellow and brown leaves, and instinctively makes us look towards the hills beyond the garden, where in autumn the heather looks like a pink veil thrown over the purple gloom that broods for ever in the dips and hollows on the hill-sides, and where even winter seems but as a sleeping beauty wrapped in gauzy mist, and waiting for that fairy prince the spring to step forth and give his magic kiss, so waking the earth forthwith and clothing it all swiftly in its flower-embroidered, wondrous, bridal robe.

As we gaze at the sunset, now fantastically clothing the quiet pale grey stream in a saffron garment, now dressing the fleecy clouds in all the divers hues it borrows from the rainbow, an ineffable sensation of peace folds us gently in its arms, and we cease to feel conscious of the present, for we seem far away from all its carking care: for an hour at least life can run alone without us, and we are suspended motionless, while all else goes on beside us, leaving us entirely on one side.

It is in times like these that we have again communion with those who are no more with us; it is almost possible to feel that, brooding over the past, those inhabiters thereof who have departed and belong no more to the things of this life, can intangibly be again close beside us, and longing, as they must do ever, to communicate their experience and their thoughts to us who yet have mouths wherewith to repeat our words, come nearer and nearer in their anguish to have communion with us, and touch us with hands that only exist in their fancy, for they have long since fallen to dust and become things that are not.

It is not therefore on the living we would ponder in our garret, but on the dead-dead hours of happiness; dead ere we knew how sweet and dear they were; and on dead friends, upon whose graves we seem to be able to climb to higher things, far better than on our dead selves, whose various forms grow or alter, it seems to us, far more from others' examples or others' experiences than from our own. For is there not in our garret, safely locked away, a collection of letters which we have never yet had courage to look at since the day we nailed them down, laughing between ourselves at the number, and promising to read them together when old age sat between us by the fireside, and, holding one of each our hands, make a bond that nothing save Death himself should sunder, and then only for a little time?

But were we to open the box, what would not troop out! dead youth laughter, song; aspirations never fulfilled, hopes disappointed, and prophecies of happiness, hideous now with the mockery of their unfulfilment: for old age never came to her, and she died; yet from our errors and mistakes did we who live here now not learn much, that renders life better because more full of work, than in those early days of dalliance in the rose-bound paths of love? We have never read over the letters, but we know each one well; and 'tis difficult to realise that we who are more profoundly interested in the good wife's housekeeping efforts downstairs, and in Jim's success at the examinations, than in aught beside, can have been the identical creature who once was the unassured lover of the wife who lies under her low cross, clasping our baby close to her childish breast. Sometimes we cannot think that this was so we think of ourselves then as of some one we had read of and felt very, very sorry for ; we, stout, middle-aged, and very happy with our surroundings, could not have been that lonely miserable mortal who came back, broken-hearted, leaving all he loved in life in the dear little churchyard, nestled down among the hills we loved, thinking that "we" were no more, and only a

desolate "I" was existent to represent the household that was to have grown so rapidly and become full, like a nest is with birds. And sometimes when we wake at night with a shiver, dreaming of those days of dreadful darkness, we almost believe that the difference in the identity is such that a separate resurrection will be needed, and that we shall discover that the boy of then and the commonplace husband of the present were, and are, two entirely different folks. Yet, then we feel whimsically jealous of the boy, and dare pursue that train of thought no farther, for we cannot tell where it may lead. But if those early days served as stepping-stones, how much more did the friendship of our later boyhood lead us on. She, too, rests below the hills whereon how often have we looked as we vainly talked about the great mystery that far too early was solved by her whom we loved. It is impossible, sitting here, with the gradual gloom closing round us in the silence of our garret, to believe that she lies out there in the darkness-she who was the only other who ever climbed to the garret, and needed no words to enter straight, unerring, ever sympathising with the mood in which she would find us. It is far easier to put her chair in the old place, and from the shadows form once more the keen glance, the forcibly formed features, and hear, through the soft sighing of the wind, her voice going over and over the well-worn subjects of death, and the life beyond the grave. A restless and unsatisfied soul, too; clever and ardent, but a Pegasus chained to a domestic car, amply laden by her loved ones, but sufficient to keep her in the ruts that jarred her intensely, for she longed, more than she ever said, to be given voice to, and wings that she might soar beyond the mere under-air of earth. But from her mistakes we learned to avoid pitfalls, and from her unselfish courage we could better appreciate the tender truth of womankind. She who was always talking of

the mysteries of death has solved them, but is very, very silent. Yet we are almost sure that she does come, and would fain tell us all she knows, for it is in our garret that we ever think of her, and her presence among us seems always like some faint delicate perfume in old relics from a flower, and whose name even is forgotten and whose form is vanished; but yet is so sweet and so subtle that it remains, and makes whoever turns over the drawer about which the scent hangs, think insensibly of purity and loveliness, and late wanderings in gardens of long ago. Yet after all, though people die, things remain; ay, the things we have made ourselves, stay ironically looking down on their creators, lying dead and dumb below them. Death would not be half so dreadful were it less defenceless; did all the earthly surroundings vanish what time the poor possessor, once holding so much, now clasping nothing in his nerveless hands, was taken away in his coffin. But it may not be; and 'tis then our garret comes more than ever into use, for in our anguish we hurry the things so fearfully like to the possessor, who can possess no more, up here to be looked over, and apportioned when time shall give us strength to overlook them again. What wonder that the time never

comes when we recollect that yonder modest trunk, labelled with evidences of the honeymoon tour, contains a soft white garment that was once a wedding dress. Ah! there is no length of life yet given to man that can dull the memories that lie sleeping in its folds. What number of days can obscure the remembrance of the talks about its purchase, the pros and cons of satin or muslin or silk talked of tremulously while her head was on my shoulder, and her hands, holding mine, turned and twisted my solitary ring as she coyly spoke of the day and asked seriously in which texture she should be clad, and which would please me best? Nay, were it shaken out, or used by others, or destroyed even, it would seem like desecrating her grave, and we leave the box unopened, and wonder, when we are gone, what will become of the dainty thing. Perhaps it may remain here for years, much as the old spinning-wheel has done in its day it hummed busily enough, and turned out yards of wondrous fine linen, in which members of our house yet die and sleep, and are born. Yet when our youngest-bitten with the prevailing fever of the day-begged to have the poor thing polished and restored to the light of day, to stand in its old accustomed place and do no work, we would not have it so, feeling that, could it but speak, how it would surely protest at being dragged from its seclusion and forced to stand an idle mockery where it had once been a useful and honoured member of the household. Yet the "youngest" is the only one who ever ventures near our garret, and who feels there somewhat of what we feel; and when she speaks not and nestles there beside the chair, an indescribable something draws away our thoughts to that other youngest child, and we almost believe the little life that was never lived by it was given to the daughter whose brown eyes and serious expression are not ours, but singularly like those other eyes that scarcely opened on the world it came only into to withdraw her mother from. It is singular for us to sit here in the sunset and to know how divers are our thoughts: the garret is the past, the present only to us; to us the sunset represents the bringer on of night, full of rest and possibilities of slumber; while to her it is a place of the dead, and the sunset is a wondrous foretaste of the dawning of another day-in which, as we gaze over the long red road over which so many of our dearest have been taken, and where we can only see long funeral trains, and only hear the sad boom of the bell in the square grey tower beyond the river, she smiles to herself as she sees in fancy the fairy prince come riding from the gaunt ruined castle between the hills, eager to claim the bride that gazes at him from the garret window. Her presence, intent as she is on a future, has not much in common with the dark rest and peace that are for ever brooding o'er the garret; and, as with a smile she kisses and lightly leaves us, her footsteps growing lighter as she emerges from the gloom, it is easy to believe that the dwellers in the garret are relieved by her absence, and that they come nearer as night draws nigh, secure in their knowledge of a sympathetic presence being alone among them. And, indeed, it is well to have such

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