Nor is this strange. Dante, the wierd and fearful poet, who, in the Middle Ages, wrote with such terrible earnestness, that, in that superstitious day,—the dread imagination painting the terrible portraits of the Infernal World-mothers, when they met him, hushed their babies on their breast, and said, "There, there! that is the man who has seen Hell!”—Dante put the matter, of which we speak, in a tolerably clear light. When dining once with the Grand Duke Della Scala, the fool, the buffoon of the court, was making infinite amusement for the court, with merry antics and mimes; the duke was pleased, and turned to the great singer Dante, and expressed his surprise—

"Why, now, this is strange, that this poor fool should be thus entertaining-should have so many clever things to say to us, to make us all laugh; while you, Dante, have nothing to say you do not make us laugh. This is strange !"

"Not at all strange, your highness," said the poet, "not at all strange- The like to the like.'".

And here, then, is the reason why of some of the most noticeable of our race we know absolutely nothing; and of others, in whom we now feel no interest, we have the chronicle of almost every moment of their life. Certainly the greatest lives are the most retired from general sympathies. The life of the many is passed in action; and,

therefore, the intrigues of courts and diplomatists, the roar of a park of artillery, and the bustle of a siege, these, and events like these, must be far more interesting than even a night at the Mermaid with Shakspear, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, for guests; or a day on Windermere with Wordsworth, Wilson, Coleridge, and De Quincy, for companions.

To many eyes, then, biography would appear the chronicle of ingratitude, the record of selfishness. Men often appear to combine in themselves two characters; but this is the first glance,-for men are always consistent with their ruling passion, and especially those men who have dared to act upon a large stage, before the eyes of men, for the obvious aggrandisement of self: the apparent inconsistency results from not looking sufficiently beneath the surface of the character. Walpole, in the Memoirs of the Court of George II., gives to us a curious account of the Cardinal Bernis; he had been elevated to the Vatican, and to the French ministry, through the interest of Madame de Pompadour; through her also he amassed benefices to the amount of £14,000 a year: yet he who had not scrupled to receive benefits from the mistress of the king, whose flatteries had obtained the greatest, and whose conscience had stooped to owe to her interest the first, dignities of the church, grew at

once to be conscientiously ungrateful, and absurdly arrogant, when he put on the hat of the cardinal. He refused to wait upon her in her apartment, and to communicate, in the dignity of the purple, with a woman of so unsanctimonious a character. The world," says Walpole, "laughed at his impudent pretences, and she punished them He had not enjoyed his dignity long, before he was served with a lettre-de-cachet, and ordered to quit Paris for his bishopric, the following morning. This cardinal appears strangely to have strained at gnats, while swallowing camels. But we can easily conceive that there was no inconsistency with himself in this; he was obviously a most selfish and unscrupulous man to cast from beneath him the ladder by which he mounted, appeared to him, probably the most ready way to more ambitious schemes; but he had not mounted a sufficient height, and in attempting to fling down the ladder, he fell himself. But the cardinal was only an illustrative instance of a large class of persons with whom it is a virtue to despise the pioneers; they scorn those who have paved the way.

"Your highness," said Columbus, "may believe me, that the earth is far from being so large as the vulgar admit. I was seven years at your royal court, and during seven years was told that my enterprise was a folly. Now, that I have opened

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THE USES OF BIOGRAPHY.

the way, tailors and shoemakers ask the privilege of going to discover new lands." It is not a Bernis alone that is ungrateful and forgetful, the most valuable of the labourers for humanity have met with similar disregard; men follow as rapidly as they can the bent of their own passion, mindless of the aiding hands by which they have been lifted to happiness or power. (Yet, in the pages of the truly written life, it is not difficult to decipher the history of the worthy character; it is not difficult to separate, in the promiscuous assemblage of names, those which have well and truly served the world; and those who only officiate as priests at the altars of Vanity and Cupidity.

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CHAPTER II.

CONTINGENCIES AND INDIVIDUALITIES OF

BIOGRAPHY.

OUR readers would not thank us, perhaps, if we were to conduct them through many speculations, by far more curious than profitable; if we, for instance, inquired into the authenticity of that idea of Mr. Coleridge's, that the history of a man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting, and contain events of greater moment, than all the threescore and ten years that follow it." However this may be, the contingencies of Biography are certainly worthy of a notice.

"It may not be devoid of amusement," says Samuel Bailey, the keen and reflective author of the Essays on the Publication of Opinions, ❝ to trace the consequences which would have ensued