University of Virginia Library

LETTER XI.
English Biography.

AMONG the innumerable works issuing
daily from the English press, there
are none more frequent than those devoted
to biography. Indeed, there is no book
more pleasing than memoirs of eminent
persons, written judiciously. The stately
pen of the historian, whose object is event,
cannot condescend to gratify curiosity
with personal notices. In reciting the
eventful battle, the generals may be named;
in recording the treaty, the statesman may
be noticed; but we learn no more of them
than is necessarily connected with those

events. The perusal of history leaves on
the mind of every reflecting reader, a curiosity
to know more of those great men,
of whom the mirror of the historian has
afforded but a glimpse. We wish to be
informed whether heroes or statesmen
derived their bravery or wisdom from
a long line of illustrious ancestors, or
achieved greatness by inherent worth. To
gratify this laudable curiosity was, undoubtedly,
the origin of biography; and
it must be acknowledged that the lives of
the good and the great, written with
judgment, often illustrate history, and present
the most instructive lessons to mankind.
Plutarch is, at once, the model for
biographers, and his lives the mirror in
which the folly and deformity of modern
English biography may be seen: I do not
think I read any modern works with such
abhorrence, disgust, and ineffable contempt.
I am an enthusiast in legitimate biography.
You know, my dear Frank, that if my
little library can boast of any thing like a
complete collection, it is in the biographical
department—to which I have frequently
repaired for profit and delight.
Indeed, what can be more profitable and
delightful than to turn the pages of correct
biography; to trace genius from its
birth; to see the Herculean mind strangling,
as it were, the snakes of ignorance
in the cradle; to observe its inherent
energies bursting the dense mists of poverty
and obscurity; to view the man of
mighty genius leaping into the angry flood
of life, like Cassius into the “troubled
“Tyber,”
When the master-spirit, in despite of
poverty, obscurity, municipal restraint,
and the shackles of ancient custom,
and leaves the epoch of his existence to
denote and glorify the age and country
which gave him birth, we read and are
inspired with noble ambition; our mental
powers are awakened. If we possess a
latent spark of genius, it is kindled to
a flame. We learn to buffet misfortune,
surmount despondency, and dare to be
eminent. But this is no representation
or effect of English biography. The object
of their biographers is not to excite
emulation in great, but to fill the vacuity
of little minds; not to exhibit their heroes,
statesmen, and literati, with dignity
to the present, or transmit their characters
with splendour to future ages—but,
by minute, frivolous, ludicrous, and often
indecorous anecdote, to belittle them in
the view of their cotemporaries; and to
convince posterity that the praise bestowed
on them by historians, or acquired by
their works, is totally unfounded. The
English connoisseur in painting will tell
you that the portrait of a great man cannot
be perfect until its tints are mellowed by
time: but the English have yet to learn,
that the same will equally apply, in a
metaphorical sense, to the original. To
render a great character perfect, they
should suffer time to mellow its tints, and
cast a friendly and oblivious shade over
those glaring colours which degraded it
in the eyes of cotemporaries. But the
present English biographers do not write
for posterity: No—they write for circulating-libraries,
reading-rooms, ornamented
studies, loungers, pastry-cooks, and green-grocers.

I adore Plutarch, who made me acquainted
with the worthies of Greece and
Rome: I honour the anonymous author
who made me acquainted with the great
Galileo: I am inspired with enthusiasm
while I read. “I live along his lines”—I
give the reins to my imagination—I am
present with the great mathematician when
he first points his newly invented telescope
toward the heavens, and establishes, by

observation, the Copernican system—I see
the sun of his genius now bursting
through the dense clouds of monkish
ignorance, then obscured by those of
ecclesiastical bigotry; and, finally, pouring
its strong light through after-ages, which
shall not be extinguished until the system
he illustrated shall be dissolved.

I am grateful to the man who wrote the
life of the modest Harvey, who gave consistency
to the art of physic by the discovery
of the circulation of the blood.
The obstacles he encountered from ignorance
and envy, which discredited his
discovery, despoiled him of his manuscripts
and his household goods, and attempted
to rob him of his fame, and
which he requited by bequeathing his patrimony
for the benefit of the art—afford
a lesson which may be useful even in my
small sphere.—Dr. Burnet's account of
the life and death of John, Earl of Rochester,
presents a more powerful antidote to
vicious pleasures than the choice of Hercules.

In his relation of the death-bed
repentance of this eminent martyr to debauchery,
every sentence is a homily
which speaks consolation to the pious and
bids the infidel prepare for future judgment.—In
the lives of Galileo, Harvey,
and others from the same school, I see
much to admire and to emulate, and nothing
to excite ridicule or disgust; I am
grateful to such biographers. But I do not
thank the author who pursues his hero
into the recesses of domestic life, and exhibits
the disgusting infirmities of our
common nature. I owe no obligations to
the biographers who exhibit to me the
Duke of Marlborough “saving a groat”—
Addison and Parnel in their cups—Dean
Swift lampooning good Mrs. Sheridan, at
Quilca—or the moral Dr. Johnson belabouring
Osborn, the printer, with a
folio. Such puny anecdotes make no part
of legitimate biography. It is trifling
with the reader of reflection, and worse
than trifling with the subject of their
memoirs. The Duke de Rochefoucauld
observes, that no man was ever a hero in the
eyes of his valet-de-chambre—and one
would imagine that the lives of most of
the eminent men in England were written
by their valets, or rather by their grooms
or scullions.—I have just been disgusted
by reading a few pages of a work which
the author has had the effrontery to style
biographical: but it is not biography; it
is the mischievous scandal of waiting-maids—the
buzz of a village bar-room—
and the gossip's tale at a vulgar accouchement.

It is difficult to decide whether most
injury is done, by these pretended biographers,
to their readers or to the reputation
of the subject of their memoirs.
When we peruse an ethical work—for
instance, should we read lessons of sublime
morality in the Rambler—should we be
convinced, by his wondrous force of language,
of the necessity of self-denial, temperance,
and the control of inordinate

passions, we should be immediately impressed
with an idea that the author lived
an eminent example of the precepts he
enjoined; and, even should we be deceived,
it is for our own benefit we should
continue to think so: but when we are
told, by his biographer, that this austere
moralist was a glutton, and a wine-bibber,
that his ungoverned passions, at times,
precipitated him into broils and striking,
and even into an association with the
lowest grades of sexual pollution, the
charm is dissolved, the writer is devested
of half his moral persuasion. If you
doubt this position, my friend, look into
yourself: you may have been pleased, it
is true, with an elegant ethical essay, written
by a known profligate, but you never
had your heart warmed or your life amended
by a sermon on temperance from a
drunken parson. It is true in writing as
in preaching, that the sentiment which
reaches the heart must be supposed to
come from the heart. In this view, therefore,
many of the modern biographies may be
considered, not merely trifling but pernicious—not
only disreputable to the subjects
of them but injurious to the cause
of virtue. Mr. Boswell, one of the most
fashionable of these anti-biographers, apologizes
for the insertion of several anecdotes,
very discreditable to Dr. Johnson,
by the moral obligation of a strict adherence
to truth; but he should have reflected
that the truth is not violated by the
omission of facts immaterial to the great
object of relation. Were a man called to
testify to a contract in a court of justice
he would not be guilty of perjury
should he omit to relate that one of the
contracting parties, on his way to the
court, had fallen into a jakes: but if this
regard to truth must, without limitation,
govern the biographer, why did he not inform
us, at least in a marginal note, how
many times in a year his illustrious friend
performed his non-naturals.

You who have often rallied me upon
what you was pleased to call the sickly
delicacy of my taste in belles-lettres, will
readily conceive the disgust I am exposed
to by perusing several recent biographical
works which you will receive by Captain
—. The truth is, when I inquire after
some great man whose fame has crossed
the Atlantic, I am immediately referred to
an elegant edition of his life—and, in reading
it, feel the same disappointment as if
I should employ Mr. West to paint a
full-length portrait of William the third,
expecting he would represent, that hero
mounted on his proud charger, contending
for kingdoms at the battle of Boyne, and
he should (in the spirit of an English
biographer) represent the glorious protestant
deliverer perched in his water-closet,
writhing in all the contortions of a dry
belly-ache! Oh, it is vile! it is descending
from the dignity of the biographer, to
expose the infirmities of the wise for the
gratification of the idle; to patch the

venerable garb of wisdom with the motley
of Harlequin, and hold it forth as a laughing-stock
for folly. When the public taste
can relish such biography it presents a
sure but melancholy proof of the decadence
of learning in any country.—Although
he cannot boast of originality, Dr.
Johnson set the fashion of this gossiping
biography. In his lives of the British
poets, he was sedulous to collect those
little ana which make weak readers laugh
and wise men grieve. From him we learn
that Addison tippled, and his wife was a
termagant; that Prior affected sordid
converse in base company, and that his
Chloe was a despicable drab; that Pope
was a glutton, and fell a sacrifice to a silver
sauce-pan, in which it was his delight to
heat potted lampries; and that Rag Smith
was a sloven. When I first read Johnson's
Lives of the British Poets I regretted
those littlenesses, but when I read his life
of the immortal Milton, the latchet of
whose shoes (with reverence be it spoken)
he was not worthy to unloose, I then hoped
I should live to see the day when some
biographer of his own school might write
this author's life, and mete out to him the
measure he meted unto others. I have
lived to be fully gratified—I have read the
life of Samuel Johnson, L. L. D. by Mrs.
Hester Thrale, Sir John Hawkins, and
James Boswell, Esq. and, to my infinite
satisfaction, these three have raised a
tripod of incense to his fame, from which
any man of decent regard to his reputation
would be happy to fly for sanctuary to the
pillory.

Such an abhorrence of these, and similar
biographers, has been excited in those
who apprehended they might be damned
by them to everlasting fame, that, to rescue
their memories from obloquy, and their
friends and relations from shame and sorrow,
several eminent literary men have
been compelled to publish their own memoirs.
Among these, Richard Cumberland,
grandson of the great Bentley, and

the first dramatist in England, has lately
published an account of his own life and
writings, and I am told, by one of his
friends, he means, by adding supplement
to supplement, to preclude the possibility
of his memory's being lacerated by these
biographical hyænas. That he published
his own memoirs from such motives is apparent
from one of his concluding sentences:—“Man
has no need, no right, no
“interest, to know of man more than I
“have enabled every one to know of me.”
David Hume, near thirty years before,
wrote his own life; which should be esteemed,
by the English, in mode, a model
for biographers; for he has disclosed all
those incidents which the world has any
need, right, or interest to know.

Besides those memoirs which issue
proudly from the press, in appropriate
volumes, there are a variety of voluminous
biographical collections, alphabetically arranged,
which are filled with celebrated
names, known only to the collectors: and,

in addition to this, the magazines lend
their aid to perpetuate memory; and
here, with wonderful industry, the darkest
recesses of obscurity are ransacked to find
names and anecdotes to fill their columns.
It is curious to observe what ingenuity is
displayed to eke out the memoirs, and give
celebrity to a man whose life might be
abundantly comprised in the biography of
a village tombstone. One of these Lilliputian
biographies I will extract, for your
amusement, from the Gentleman's Magazine—it
will serve as a specimen.

“August.—Died, at Wragby, on the
“23d ult. Mr. Jacob Bonnycastle, aged
“64.—N. B. Some notice of this eminent
“person in our next.”

“September.—Mr. Jacob Bonnycastle,
“whose death we announced in our last,
“was the son of Mr. Isaac Bonnycastle,
“and grandson to the justly celebrated
“Mr. Abraham Bonnycastle, who, in
“1742, was the first person who disco
“vered the approach of Lord Anson's

“ship, the Centurion, after her voyage
“round the world. The late Mr. Jacob
“Bonnycastle was forty years usher to
“an academy—and was remarkable for
“having never used but one pen during
“this period, which was made of a gray
“goose-quill. It is said, in his youth, he
“actually conversed with a gentleman
“who was familiarly acquainted with the
“celebrated Bamfylde Moore Carew,
“king of the beggars.”

Now, one would suppose sufficient had
been said to emblazon the memory of the
“mighty dead”—not so: in the next
number we find further notices of the
“celebrated Mr. Jacob Bonnycastle, in
“a letter from `a schoolfellow' to the
“editors of the Gentleman's Maga
“zine.

“The ample justice you have rendered
“the memory of my learned and illus
“trious friend, Mr. Jacob Bonnycastle, of
“Wragby, has emboldened me to correct

“a few inadvertent errors in your state
“ment, for the benefit of posterity. The
“pen which Mr. Bonnycastle solong used,
“to his own honour and that of the na
“tion, was not deplumed from a gray
“goose, but once adorned the pinions of
“a crow. Mr. Bonnycastle was not the
“son of Isaac Bonnycastle, but of the late
“Andrew Bonnycastle, who was executed
“for sheep-stealing. His uncle was the
“noted Edward Bonnycastle, commonly
“called lying Ned. His mother was a
“noted beauty, in her youth, and was kept
“by the famous blackleg, Colonel Kelly.
“His maternal grandmother was the cele
“brated Moll Huggins, well known in
“the metropolis, about the year 1737, by
“the name of wapping Moll.—You may
“rely on these facts, as I have been inti
“mately acquainted with this worthy
“family near half a century.

Marginal note, by the editors of the
Gentleman's Magazine.

“We think we discover in `a school“`fellow,'
an old and valued corres
“pondent: we hope to be favoured with
“further communications from his in
“valuable pen. It is researches like these
“which add to the solid stock of English
“literature, and will enable us to preserve,
“in the eyes of foreigners, that proud pre
“eminence to which we are so justly en
“titled, as the first nation in arts, arms,
“and letters.”

Now, my dear Frank, how edifying
must all this be to the learned; and what
rich consolation to the family of the deceased.—As
I write from memory, I will
not say that the above extracts are correctly
made, but, you may be assured, you

will find the substance of them in the
obituaries of the English magazines.—
But there is a species of biography still
more reprehensible than those which I
have noticed. I allude to the lives of
celebrated prostitutes, published generally
under the specious title of “APOLOGIES,”
in which these lewd women display their
illicit amours with matchless effrontery,
and confirm the maxim, that when their
sex have abandoned their chastity they
are capable of greater daring than ours.
The notorious Constantia Philips may be
considered as the mistress of this school,
but her more modern disciples have so far
exceeded her in fascination of style, vividness
of description, and bold exposure of
meretricious intrigue, that her infamous
memoirs may be considered, in a comparative
view, as an ethical work written expressly
for the promotion of virtue. The
avidity with which these base and seductive
works are purchased and read by
what are called modest women, in England,
is a gross evidence of the corruption of
national taste and morals. The English
writers on the rise and fall of the Roman
empire, with great propriety, point to the
corruption of female manners as one of
the certain indiciæ of its decline. I can
see but little difference, in point of delicacy,
between the English lady who reads
openly these polluted memoirs, and the
Roman matron who exposed herself unrobed
on the Arena.

If the British parliament were as vigilant
to regulate morals as commerce,
they would long ere this have interdicted
such publications by fine or imprisonment.
And the prosecution and punishment
of a printer of one of these apologies
for pollution, would have adorned the national
annals much more than the prosecution
of some wretched pamphleteer
against the ministry, whose offence, in
the next administration, may be considered
a virtue—for the support of any
administration will at best procure an

equivocal, temporary, and partial approbation;
but to support morals will secure
the applause of the wise and good of
all parties in all ages. Let us, my friend,
endeavour so to live that we may at all
times secure the response of a good conscience;—and
God preserve us from
English biographers!