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Updated: June 25, 2025
Is it not monstrous this interference with the privacy of common citizens? And yet this specimen has an air of dignity compared with the grosser exploits of the hired eavesdropper. Not long since there appeared in a Sunday paper a full list, with portraits and biographies, of all the ladies in New York who are habitual drunkards.
In all previous histories and biographies that I had read, there was much going round and about poets and heroes, an external, academic treatment; with Emerson I seemed to come nearer the possible ideal which was already vaguely outlined in my mind. Besides there was much else than Napoleon and Shakespeare in the pages.
In the spring of this year she had been engaged by the editors of Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia to write the chapter on suffrage and prepare the biographies of a number of eminent women. Amidst all the other cares of the summer and fall, she had been endeavoring to collect the materials for these sketches, having the usual experience.
In history we are surrounded by men long dead, but whose speech and whose deeds survive. We almost catch the sound of their voices; and what they did constitutes the interest of history. We never feel personally interested in masses of men; but we feel and sympathize with the individual actors, whose biographies afford the finest and most real touches in all great historical dramas."
His field was all past history, around the altitudes of which are clustered biographical traits and sketches of famous sinners and famous saints, of heroes and lofty criminals; and, along with this, contemporaneous Florentine and Italian history, with its tumults and vicissitudes, its biographies and personalities, its wraths and triumphs.
L.A. Coolidge, Ulysses S. Grant , is not as partisan as most of the biographies of the time and is valuable despite a lack of a thorough understanding of the period. The closing months of Johnson's administration found him almost in a state of isolation.
In wonder-working capacities these saints were all put in the shade by the Calabrian Francesco di Paola, who raised fifteen persons from the dead in his boyhood. He used to perform a hundred miracles a day, and "it was a miracle, when a day passed without a miracle." The index alone of any one of his numerous biographies is enough to make one's head swim.
It is in this last, written with the shadow of death upon him, that the central thought of his system is developed. He may have derived it from Turgot, his master, and the subject of one of his noblest biographies, but he gave it a consecration of his own, and later writers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or reduce to scientific rule and line his living thought.
He had his own 'welt-schmerz', though he did not go to a sanitarium to cure it; he was forced to set an age limit of ten, and then establish a high court of appeal; for there were boys whose biographies, if they are ever written, will be as hazy as those of certain world-wide celebrities who might be mentioned concerning the date and exact spot of the entrance of their heroes into the light.
The words "very scanty" are used most advisedly, for in very truth the American historian is a rara avis. Of American compilers-of-facts, to be sure, there have been and are very many, but an aggregation of details is not a history, nor can a man who makes a book out of local gossip and the biographies of local heroes and heroines be called an historian.
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