The letters written by him to friends, acquaintances, political correspondents, individual men of one kind or another, have been gathered together and have been brought into print not, as is most frequently the case, under the discretion or judgment of a friendly biographer, but by a great variety of more or less sympathetic people.

The subject is worthy of some scant attention, if only to show how worthless is the attempt to construct out of rumor the story of a great life which, fortunately perhaps, had no contemporary biographer.

But as from Johnson's long residence under Mr. Thrale's roof, and his intimacy with her, the account which she has given of him may have made an unfavourable and unjust impression, my duty, as a faithful biographer, has obliged me reluctantly to perform this unpleasing task.

As strange as is Mohammed's transformation from an ordinary son of man, which he wanted to be, into the incarnation of Divine Light, as the later biographers represent him, it is still more astounding that the intercession of saints should have become indispensable to the community of Mohammed, who, according to Tradition, cursed the Jews and Christians because they worshipped the shrines of their prophets.

If my memory serves me right it was at about this time that I, the humble biographer of Mr. Clive Newcome's life, met him again for the first time since my school days at Grey Friars.

A new book by Edward S. Ellis"From Ranch to White House"is a life of Theodore Roosevelt, while the author of the others, William M. Thayer, is a celebrated biographer.

The appearance, during her absence, of her volume of "Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson" had given unfriendly critics an opportunity to pass harsh judgment upon her literary merits, and had excited the jealousy of rival biographers of the dead lion.

Byron's most careful biographer has said of him: "Although on his first expedition to Greece he was dressed in the tartan of the Gordon clan, yet the whole bent of his mind, and the character of his poetry, are anything but Scottish.

Thomas Lodge, in his "Alarum against Usurers," 1584, speaks of his "birth," and of "the offspring from whence he came," as if he were at least respectably descended; and on the authority of Anthony Wood, it has been asserted by all subsequent biographers that he was of a Lincolnshire family.

"The tree," says Dr. Pauli, one of his ablest biographers, "which now casts its shadow far and near over the world, when menaced with destruction in its bud, was carefully guarded by Alfred; but at the period when it was ready to burst forth into a plant, he was forced to leave it to the influence of time.

She left an immense fortune, which was acquired in ways into which an eulogistic biographer of the lady would not enquire.

While, at this day, she is regarded as the cause of her husband's sins, by her coldness, formality, and what not,fidelity and love to her memory absolutely require, not fresh disclosures of a private character, but a new presentment of the evidence long ago given to the world by herself and by her husband's very partial biographer.

His decease, his fond biographers have told us, took place "about three in the afternoon;" and he was "aged fifty-eight years, eight months, and twenty-eight days."

Good Lort, deliver us!" The whole letter, written in the poet's mature and natural style, gives a vivid picture of the social life and surroundings of his Cambridge days: how much of the set and sententious moralizing of some of his formal biographers might we not have spared, for a report of the conversation on the road from London to Newstead.

If Dr. Kane's character had not been free from any taint of imposture and vainglory, and if his reputation had not been of that kind which can be submitted to the austerest tests without being materially lessened, he would have suffered much in having so frank and truthful a biographer as Dr. Elder.

BOZZY, James Boswell, the gossipy biographer of Dr. Johnson (1740-1795).

Party-spirit has so much to do with stories of princes, and princes are so little in a condition to notice them, that, on the principle of not condemning a man till he has been heard in his defence, an honest biographer would be loath to credit these horrors of Cardinal Ippolito, did not the violent nature of the times, and the general character of the man, even with his defenders, incline him to do so.

He had a sensitive horror of having his life written by an ignorant or unfriendly biographer, and even spoke of the justice of taking such a person's life by anticipation, as they tell us.

One of his latest publications was "A Tour through the Island of Great Britain," a performance of very inferior merit; but De Foe was now the garrulous old man, and his spirit (to use the words of an ingenious biographer) "like a candle struggling in the socket, blazed and sunk, blazed and sunk, till it disappeared at length in total darkness."

It is painful to be thus obliged to vindicate a man who, in his heart, towered above the petty arts of fraud and imposition, against an injudicious biographer, who undertook to be his editor, and the protector of his memory.

Manfred, his witch drama, as the author called it, has had a special attraction for inquisitive biographers, because it has been supposed in some dark manner to reveal the secrets of his prison house.

And so, having the honour to be the juvenile biographer of Mr. Clive Newcome, I deem it wise to preface the story of his life with a brief account of events and persons antecedent to his birth.

In the meantime Mistress Oldfield interceded with the mighty Robert Walpole, and the result of all this wire-pulling was that Savage received the king's pardon,[A] being thus left free to continue the persecution of his alleged mother, to beg from friends and strangers alike, and to follow a mode of life which scandalised even his kindly biographer.

There is a spirit in every touch which differs as much from the softened and soulless compositions of certain modern artists, as does the florid architecture of the ancients from the starved proportions of these days, or the rich and graceful style of the Essayists from the fabrications of little, self-conceited biographers.

The writer of "Piers of Fulham" lived to see this fashion of introducing a third meal, and that again split into two for luxury's sake; for his metrical biographer tells us, that he refused rear-suppers, from a fear of surfeiting.