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Updated: April 30, 2025
On this subject I am afraid I shall be rather obscure, but I can assure the reader not at all more so than Marinus in his Life of Proclus, or many other biographers and autobiographers of fair reputation. This pleasure, I have said, was to be had only on a Saturday night. What, then, was Saturday night to me more than any other night?
It was commenced by Hadrian, and afterwards finished as a family mausoleum by Antoninus Pius, and must always possess a romantic interest from the part it played in the life of that most whimsical and audacious of autobiographers, Benvenuto Cellini.
Among this group of writers, Cardinal de Retz seems to me to be beyond question the greatest, but La Rochefoucauld is not to be despised in his capacity as the arranger of personal recollections. We must not expect from these seventeenth-century autobiographers the sort of details which we demand from memoir-writers to-day.
Greatest of autobiographers, he extenuates nothing: you see the whole man with his worst faults and best qualities; weaknesses accentuated by the energy with which they are charactered, apparent waste of mental forces bent on solving the insoluble, inherited tastes and prejudices, altruistic impulses and virile passions, egoism and idealism, all strangely mingled and continually warring against each other, until from the death-throes of spiritual conflict issued a new birth and a new life.
It does not spoil the impression when the reader often detects him bragging or lying; the stamp of a mighty, energetic, and thoroughly developed nature remains. By his side our modern autobiographers, though their tendency and moral character may stand much higher, appear incomplete beings. He is a man who can do all and dares do all, and who carries his measure in himself.
Yet it would be unjust to close this list of autobiographers without listening to a word from one man who was both worthy and happy. This is the well-known philosopher of practical life, Luigi Cornaro, whose dwelling at Padua, classical as an architectural work, was at the same time the home of all the muses.
I don't know my age exactly, but it has always been a weakness of mine to make it out less than it really is. "I assure you, general, I do not in the least doubt your statement. One of our living autobiographers states that when he was a small baby in Moscow in 1812 the French soldiers fed him with bread." "Well, there you see!" said the general, condescendingly.
"Helen, I have a mind," continued she, "to tell you what, in the language of affected autobiographers, I might call 'some passages of my life." Helen's eyes brightened, as she eagerly thanked her: but hearing a half- suppressed sigh, she added "Not if it is painful to you though, my dear Lady Davenant."
He used the familiar German "du"; for him she was still his little friend. But to her the moment was too poignant for speech. The terrible passages in the last writings of this greatest of autobiographers, which she had hoped poetically colored, were then painfully, prosaically true. "Can it be that I still actually exist?
For the earlier half of his career we have long had his own narrative; and Newman is a prince of autobiographers. It was his wish that the 'Apologia' should be the final and authoritative account of his life in the Church of England, and of the steps by which he was led to transfer his allegiance to another communion.
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