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Updated: June 23, 2025
Morley's life of Jerome Cardan. I am reminded as I write how rare are the really good medical biographies. The autobiographies are better. Ambrose Paré's sketches of his own life, which was both eventful and varied, are scattered through his treatise on surgery, and he does not gain added interest in the hands of Malgaigne.
You cannot lead men to the divine by crawling in the dust. The real saints have no time to write their autobiographies. When a man boils over quickly you soon find out what is in him. True piety simply is the prosperity of the eternal things in a man. The world never will be won from the love of evil until we make the good lovely. The cry, "How may I be right?" is the cry of the ages.
There is no instance in which we see more clearly the philosophical value of autobiographies, than in these vivid pictures which the great Italian tragedian and comic author have delineated. Some of the most interesting works of Lionardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Albert Dürer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Andrea del Sarto, are their portraits painted by themselves.
Our children may not grow into the genius, but they will grow into somewhat of the goodness of the illustrious and saintly John Henry Newman, if, in after years, they can write the first lines of their autobiographies in the words which open the biographical part of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua: I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the Bible.
Our Lord God doth like a printer, who setteth the letters backwards; we see and feel well his setting, but we shall see the print yonder in the life to come. A beautiful simile. Add that even in this world the lives, especially the autobiographies, of eminent servants of Christ, are like the looking-glass or mirror, which, reversing the types, renders them legible to us. Ib. p. 403.
It collects their respective autobiographies and their mutual criticisms. The real truths, half truths and delusions each has added to the accumulating common stock it sifts and weighs, mercilessly piling a dustheap beyond Mr. Boffin's wildest dreams, and rescuing, on the other hand, from the old wastebasket many discarded scraps of real but till now unacknowledged value.
And yet these Memoirs are perhaps the most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality, one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they are more entertaining than Gil Blas, or Monte Cristo, or any of the imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been written in imitation of them.
Augustine's Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini's Life; Montaigne's Essays; Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz; Rousseau's Confessions; Linnaeus's Diary; Gibbon's, Hume's, Franklin's, Burns's, Alfieri's, Goethe's, and Haydon's Autobiographies.
But the best observers see but very little of what goes on in the youthful soul, the development of which is very largely subterranean. Only when the feelings erupt in some surprising way is the process manifest. The best of these sources are autobiographies, and of these only few are full of the details of this stage.
Both of them had shared the truly revolutionary enthusiasm, and both came in time to be classed with the Tories. Both, as will be seen, had a marked influence upon J. S. Mill. Wordsworth has written in the Prelude one of the most remarkable of intellectual autobiographies. He was to be, though he never quite succeeded in being, a great philosophical poet.
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