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The touch could not have been more efficacious, though it might have lingered longer, if he had known he was propitiating his future biographer. New York at the time of our author's birth was a rural city of about twenty-three thousand inhabitants, clustered about the Battery.
In this way young Astley Cooper, from his fearless and enterprising disposition, soon became a sort of leader of the Yarmouth boys, and at their head, for a time, seems to have devoted himself to every kind of amusement within his reach—riding, boating, fishing, and not unfrequently sports of a less harmless character, such as breaking lamps and windows, ringing the church bells at all hours, disturbing the people by frequent alterations of the church clock, so that if any mischief were committed it was sure, says his admiring biographer, to be set down to him.
This is not an isolated instance. Southerners love their saints, and do not content themselves with chill verbal expressions of esteem. So the biographer of Saint Giangiuseppe records that "one of the deceased saint's toes was bitten off with most regret-able devotion by the teeth of a man in the crowd, who wished to preserve it as a relic.
Gait, West's biographer, saw the picture in the state in which it had thus been left sixty-seven years afterward; and the artist himself used to acknowledge that in none of his subsequent efforts had he been able to excel some of the touches of invention in this his first essay."
Lincoln's most fortunate appointments, owed his position, not to his literary abilities, which were then unknown to the country at large, but to his having written a campaign life of Lincoln, a service which was always considered by the successful candidate as entitling the biographer to some appointment.
That is a delicate question and one to which his biographer would find difficulty in replying.
Never was any biographer more sparing of his praise, or more abundant in his censures. He seemingly delights more in exposing blemishes, than in recommending beauties; slightly passes over excellencies, enlarges upon imperfections, and not content with his own severe reflections, revives old scandal, and produces large quotations from the forgotten works of former criticks.
It is only fair to notice these facts, because his controversial writings might convey a very different impression of the character of the man. Toplady is described by his biographer as 'the legitimate successor of Hervey. There are certain points of resemblance between the two men.
The cry is raised of there being nothing sacred, of the violation of domestic privacy, of the sanctities of life being endangered, of indiscretions, and violations of confidences, by the biographer. Accordingly, just as Macaulay decided that, in general, tragedy was corrupted by eloquence, and comedy by wit, so biography and history have suffered from the dignity of Clio.
Keble himself, as his biographer attests, had a very humble opinion of his own work, seldom read it hated to hear it praised consented with great difficulty to its glorification by sumptuous editions.
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