career, I accept in spite of the varied uses of the majestic volumes that plaintive judgment of Carlyle:
"Masson has hung on his Milton peg all the politics, which Milton, poor fellow, had never much to do with except to print a pamphlet or two."
Masson has hung on "his Milton peg" not only "all the politics which Milton, poor fellow, had never much to do with" but also all the ecclesiastical and literary history with which Milton had even less concern. Biography is not a peg for anything save the character and exploits of a man whose career answers the tests of biographic fitness!
I should hardly be bold enough to speak of the relations of biography and science, and of the peril to biographic method of bringing the two studies into too close a conjunction, had not the late Sir Francis Galton and several living correspondents urged on me, in my capacity of editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, the general advantage of adapting the biographic method of the
