wrote of their author in the "Quarterly Review": "He has pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by publishing his own life, and the private history of his acquaintances."
A better illustration of La Fontaine's wisest fable, "The Miller, his Son, and the Ass," could not anywhere be found. The only way to please everybody is to have no ass; that is, to print nothing, and leave the world at peace. But as authorship is a trade by which men seek to live, they must in some way get their beast to market, and be criticized accordingly.
It is probable that the increasing vogue of biography, the amazing output of books about men and women of meagre attainments and flickering celebrity, sets the modern autobiographer at work.
"For now the dentist cannot die,
And leave his forceps as of old,
But round him, ere his clay be cold,
Is spun the vast biography."
And leave his forceps as of old,
But round him, ere his clay be cold,
Is spun the vast biography."
