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In the last forty years of the fifteenth century, the history of "the Pale" is the biography of the family of the Geraldines. We must make some brief mention of the remarkable men to whom we refer.
Broadly speaking, we may say that the physicist finds it convenient to classify particulars into "things," while the psychologist finds it convenient to classify them into "perspectives" and "biographies," since one perspective may constitute the momentary data of one percipient, and one biography may constitute the whole of the data of one percipient throughout his life.
How fortunate it would have been for me if I had heeded them. But I was young, I was but seven years of age, and vain, foolish, and anxious to attract attention. I wrote the biography, and have never been in a respectable house since. How curious and interesting is the parallel as far as poverty of biographical details is concerned between Satan and Shakespeare.
That our blessed Master, even in His state as man, beheld its evil characteristics looming on the future, seems likely not alone from both His human keenness and His divine omniscience, but from here and there a hint dropped in his biography. Why should He, on several occasions, have seemed, I will say with some apparent sharpness, to have rebuked His virgin mother.
The age began to take a deep and curious interest in men's lives; biography was written for the first time and autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing both in England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose delight it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of enquiry for all men, came to its own.
In the summer of this year Lady Burton went to Ventnor, and also paid a few visits, and in the autumn she stayed at Ascot with her sister Mrs. Van Zeller, whose husband had just died. In November she went to Mortlake, where she settled down in earnest to write the biography of her husband, a work which occupied her eight months.
There are three ways of writing a biography: one is, to make a simple narrative and leave the reader to form his own opinion; another, to present the facts so as to illustrate the author's conception of his hero's character; a third, and the most common way, to proceed like an advocate, to suppress everything which can be suppressed, to sneer at everything which cannot be answered, to put the most favorable construction upon all dubious matters, and to throw the strongest light upon every fortunate circumstance.
Paul's, not only worked at Florence but went to perfect his Greek in the Isle of Rhodes. Sir Thomas More was the pupil of Grocyn, whom he seems to have excelled in scholarship. His affection for books is known by his son-in-law's careful biography. An anecdote cited by Dibdin preserves a record of the fate of his library.
Moreover I know nothing except literature; I could only write a literary biography; and it has always seemed to me a painful irony that men who have put into their writings what other people put into deeds and acts should be the very people whose lives are sedulously written and rewritten, generation after generation. The instinct is natural enough.
Trumbull was a vigorous orator and a rough-rider in debate, but he did not possess the store of legal knowledge and the vast fund of general information which Sumner could draw from. One has to read the fourth volume of Pierce's biography to realize the dimensions of Sumner's work during the period from 1861 to 1869.
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