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STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

know what a man thought than to know what he afterwards thought that he ought to have thought. 'I was totally mistaken in my prediction,' as he quaintly remarks in a note to his Travels, 'and yet, on a revision, I think that I was right in it.' That is, the facts which really happened were those which, at the time, were the most unlikely to happen. Few historical facts, indeed, are more interesting than the visions, never to be precisely realised, which animated the imagination of the first observers of great movements. Young, too, was better at observation than at reflection. When he revised his journals of former tours and cut out the personal elements, he was substituting a set of statistical diagrams for a concrete picture; and he filled the vacant space by economic speculations often of very inferior merit. Miss Betham-Edwards, indeed, declares, as it is natural for an enthusiastic biographer to declare, that Young instinctively anticipated Adam Smith, and Mill, and Cobden, and all the pundits of political economy. He was, if I may be pardoned for saying so, much too charming a person to deserve that equivocal praise. He is delightful by reason of his vivacity, his amiable petulance, and unconscious inconsistencies. The wisest philosopher, if