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It is true that, in her case, this stage-infatuation was a real misfortune, for in some other walk she might have made a furore. That nude scene, in fact, was symbolic of the temperament, and, had she taken to writing, would have come out as an autobiographic novel.

Yet the autobiographic tendency, as befitted a poet of the highest lyric type, remained to the end a powerful characteristic.

From this close relation between his life and his works, the "Vita Nuova" has a peculiar interest, as the earliest of Dante's writings, and the most autobiographic of them in its form and intention. In it we are brought into intimate personal relations with the poet. He trusts himself to us with full and free confidence; but there is no derogation from becoming manliness in his confessions.

I am asked to jot down a few autobiographic odds and ends from such data of record and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a student of life; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser of their character, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives.

To say Felix Fay is more or less to mean Floyd Dell, for the narrative is obviously autobiographic at many points. But were it entirely invention it would testify none the less to the affection with which this novelist feels his world and the lucidity with which he represents it.

Thus awakes in him, quite gradually, the spirit of the collector. Or take the case of one whose collection is not of beautiful things, but of autobiographic symbols: take the case of the glutton. He will have pocketed many menus before it occurs to him to arrange them in an album.

The details which Bacon gives of his personal history are of special interest as throwing light upon the habits of life of a scholar in the thirteenth century. Their autobiographic charm is increased by their novelty, for they give a view of ways of life of which but few particulars have been handed down.

And as to ‘Wuthering Heights,’ a story which could not, of course, be told in one autobiography, the method of telling it by means of a group of autobiographies, though clumsy enough from the constructor’s point, was yet just as effective as a more artistic method. And it was true instinct of genius that led Emily Brontë to adopt the autobiographic method even under these heavy conditions.

Both from his own autobiographic notes, from the traditionary testimony of his family, and from the no less valuable evidence of his most distinguished schoolfellow, we know that his youthful character and habits assign him very conspicuously to that perhaps somewhat small class of eminent men whose boyhood has given distinct indications of great things to come.

Whether these in Kate's original MS. were entitled "Autobiographic Sketches," or "Selections Grave and Gay," from the military experiences of a Nun, or possibly "The Confessions of a Biscayan Fire-Eater," is more than I know.