It was an amiable tenet in the orthodox creed of an ancient biographic school, that the career destined for biographic treatment should directly teach morality, should be conspicuously virtuous. The biography should, before all else, "show virtue her own feature," or at any rate hymn her worth. Gentle Izaak Walton, like many biographers Who wrote before and after him, regarded biography as "an honour due to the virtuous dead, and a lesson in magnanimity to those Who shall succeed them." In Walton's demure judgment, dead men who are morally Unworthy lie outside the scope of biography. It speaks well for the goodness of the world that good men have occupied more biographic pens than bad men, and that biographers have always cherished a charitable preference for benefactors over malefactors. But therein lies no proof that the merits of biography depend on its powers of edification.
It is with very large qualifications that Walton's ethical presumption can pass current. Sinners excite the commemorative
