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largely from domestic partiality, I have already spoken enough. The vice of undue length is equally widespread and its. prevalence stands in little need of illustration. It is a failing against which Plutarch’s example warns us even more loudly than against idolatry. Yet it flourishes luxuriantly in spite of the master’s warning. The lineal measurement of biography has no single, fixed scale. There is a threefold graduation answering in the first place to the importance of the career, in the second place to the gross amount of available material, and in the third place to the intrinsic value or biographic pertinence of the surviving records. The correspondence or the journals or the reports of conversation out of which the biographic web is to be woven vary immensely in biographic service. Lack of the raw material would make it impossible to write a life of Shakespeare of the same length as Lord Morley’s Life of Gladstone. But brevity may be enjoined, in the case of men of the first eminence, not