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At one time a biographer's task was easy: he simply took the hearsay and inventions of Hawkins, and accepted them as gospel truth whenever they could not be tested. The fact that whenever they could by any means be tested they were found to be false even this did not dismay the biographer. Hawkins's favourite pastime was libelling the dead. He libelled Dr.

In John Eliot's time, there was all to hope; and the community of Englishmen with whom he lived, though stern, fierce, intolerant, and at times cruel in their intolerance, did not embarrass his work nor corrupt the Indians by the grosser and coarser vices, when, in his biographer's words, "our Eliot was on such ill terms with the devil as to alarm him with sounding the silver trumpets of Heaven in his territories, and make some noble and zealous endeavours towards ousting him of his ancient possessions."

I must here be allowed to italicize a remark of the biographer's concerning Harriet Shelley: "That no act of Shelley's during the two years which immediately preceded her death tended to cause the rash act which brought her life to its close seems certain." Yet her husband had deserted her and her children, and was living with a concubine all that time!

See also ii. 12, where, by some inaccuracy, he makes him to have been in India twenty years before he was at Babylon. Olear. ad locum et præfat. ad vit. The common date of his birth is fixed by his biographer's merely accidental mention of the revolt of Archelaus against the Romans, as taking place before Apollonius was twenty years old; see i. 12. Philostr. i. 19. Philostr. i. 27-41.

"Brisk" is his biographer's description of him. Feather-headed, flippant, and almost impudent, you might have been tempted to say of him had you joined the little party at that moment.

It might bring it nearer to Milton, as Dante brought Keats. Witness his revision of Hyperion. Wherein, then, is the use? Why, it is in the art of it. I will convict you out of Alberti's own mouth, or his biographer's, for he spake it truly.

We must not get impatient over these curious inharmoniousnesses and irreconcilabilities in Shelley's character. You can see by the biographer's attitude towards them that there is nothing objectionable about them. Shelley was doing his best to make two adoring young creatures happy: he was regarding the one with affectionate consideration by mail, and he was assuaging the other one at home.

How's Major Dobbings? and likely enough would turn to the waiter, and bid him, 'Give this gent a glass of the same, and score it up to yours truly! We have his biographer's word for it, that he would have winked at the Duke of Wellington, with just as little scruple.

If his own life did not supply enough material we could multiply our characters, as did Dickens, or journey sideways, into little essays, as did Thackeray. His life and his biographer's pen might fail to give interest to such devices, but the plea is now for "realism," which most writers take to mean microscopical examination of minutia.

Fearing that at last he did seem to have taken some little heart of grace. "And then we," said Greatheart, "set forward, and I went before him; but the man was of few words, only he would often sigh aloud." "Dumpish at the House Beautiful" is his biographer's not very respectful comment on the margin of the history. There were too many merry-hearted damsels running up and down that house for Mr.