tions to editors or to biographers which tempted them into a difficult adventure? Was it a desire to anticipate the opinion of contemporaries, and while yet living to taste the sweets of servile flattery? They chatter of many things, but are reticent on those most important to the historian. As appeals to a simple faith, and as childlike murmurings of unrelated facts they awaken wonder without gratifying a reasonable curiosity. To compile such works and then to destroy the original records, as if the last word had been said, is a crime against history, and an unavailing plea in abatement against further consideration. Yet most of those self-constituted apologists have been lawyers, and some of them good lawyers.
To approach such modern instances with due reverence is difficult. Conditions have altered, the standard of greatness has changed, and the demands as well as the responsibilities of biographer and editor are other than were accepted unquestioned a halfcentury ago. History is better written, and the subject is attracting the best; but autobiography lags behind, good-naturedly accepted for its defects rather than for its virtues. The charm of literary autobiography persists, but the unreliability of political autobiography has come to be a byword. To describe action directly and intention truthfully after the event appears to demand opposite qualities. Magna pars fui—the accent is on the magna, and the relator exaggerates his own importance while twisting his facts and misstating his motives.
Is it not a form of conceit, and a vulgar form at that, to suppose that the story of a life can be only self-written? Is man so little influenced by circumstances and so greatly moulded by his own will that he can consciously assume to be master of his own fortunes? The self-made man is subject to attacks of assurance which awaken in him an anxiety to tell others how he accomplished it—it referring to any achievement from making a large fortune to writing a popular song. Success is the worst judge of itself, and some other tribunal should take cognizance and, if possible, commit such budding sprouts to safe quarters where they may interchange their confidences without making an undue exhibition of themselves. The thing is possible, for did not an Italian saint not only overcome the Devil but make him confess all his sins?
The human machine is self-advertising, for its wants are imperative and its acts come for judgment before an immediate tribunal—public opinion. Is not, then, the desire to write autobiography a confession that some explanation of conduct is to say the least expedient? The atmosphere of publicity in which a public character
