impressiveness of result. Whatever other effect Webster may produce upon us, he never leaves us indifferent. We may blame, we may criticise, as much as we will; we may say that all this ghastliness is only a trick of theatrical blue-light; we shudder, and admire nevertheless. We may say he is melodramatic, that his figures are magic-lantern pictures that waver and change shape with the curtain on which they are thrown: it matters not; he stirs us with an emotion deeper than any mere artifice could stir.

IV

CHAPMAN

per

As I turn from one to another of the old dramatists, and see how little is known about their sonal history, I find a question continually coming back, invincible as a fly with a strong sense of duty, which I shall endeavor to fan away by a little discussion. This question is whether we gain or lose by our ignorance of the personal details of their history. Would it make any difference in our enjoyment of what they wrote, if we had the means of knowing that one of them was a good son, or the other a bad husband? that one was a punctual paymaster, and that the other never paid his washer-woman for the lustration of the legendary single shirt without which he could not face a neglectful world, or hasten to the theatre with the manuscript of the new play for which posterity was to be more thankful than the manager? Is it a love of knowledge or of gossip that renders these private concerns so interesting to us, and makes us willing to intrude on the awful seclusion of the dead, or to flatten our noses against the windows of the living? The law is more scrupulous than we in maintaining the inviolability of private letters. Are we to profit by every indiscretion, by every

breach of confidence? Of course, in whatever the man himself has made a part of the record we are entitled to find what intimations we can of his genuine self, of the real man, veiled under the draperies of convention and circumstance, who was visible for so many years, yet perhaps never truly seen, obscurely known to himself, conjectured even by his intimates, and a mere name to all beside. And yet how much do we really know even of men who profess to admit us to every corner of their nature - of Montaigne? of Rousseau? As in the box under the table at which the automaton chess-player sat, there is always a closet within that which is so frankly opened to us, and into this the enigma himself absconds while we are staring at nothing in the other. Even in autobiographies, it is only by inadvertencies, by unconscious betrayals when the author is off his guard, that we make our discoveries. In a man's works we read between the lines, not always wisely. No doubt there is an intense interest in watching the process by which a detective critic like Sainte-Beuve dogs his hero or his victim, as the case may be, with tireless sympathy or vindictive sagacity, tracking out clew after clew, and constructing out of the life a comment on the works, or, again, from the works divining the character. But our satisfaction depends upon the bias with which the inquisition is conducted, and, after assisting at this process in the case of Châteaubriand, for example, are we sure that we know the man better, or only what was morbid in the man, which, perhaps, it was not profitable for us to know?

But is it not after the discreditable particulars which excite a correspondingly discreditable curiosity that we are eager, and these that we read with greatest zest? So it should seem if we judged by the fact that biography, and especially that of men of letters, tends more and more towards these indecent exposures. The concern of the biographer should be with the mind, and not with the body of his victim. We are willing to be taken into the parlor and the library, but may fairly refuse to be dragged down to the kitchen or to look into the pantry. Boswell's "Life of Johnson" does not come under this condemnation, being mainly a record of the great doctor's opinions, and, since done with his own consent, is almost to be called autobiographical. There are certain memoirs after reading which one blushes as if he had not only been peeping through a key-hole, but had been caught in the act. No doubt there is a fearful truth in Shakespeare's saying,

"The evil that men do lives after them,"

but I should limit it to the evil done by otherwise good men, for it is only in this kind of evil that others will seek excuse for what they are tempted to do, or palliation for what they have already done. I like to believe, and to think I see reason for believing, that it is the good that is in men which is immortal, and beneficently immortal, and that the sooner the perishable husk in which it was enveloped is suffered to perish and crumble away, the sooner we shall know them as they really were. I

remember how Longfellow used to laugh in his kindly way when he told the story of the French visitor who asked him for some révélations intimes of his domestic life, to be published in a Paris newspaper. No man would have lost less by the most staring light that could have been admitted to those sacred retreats, but he shrank instinctively from being an accomplice to its admission. I am not sure that I ought to be grateful for the probable identification of the Dark Lady to whom twenty-five of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed, much as I should commend the research and acuteness that rendered it possible. We had, indeed, more than suspected that these sonnets had an address within the bills of mortality, for no such red-blooded flame as this sometimes is ever burned on the altar of the Ideal. But whoever she was, she was unembodied so long as she was nameless, she moved about in a world not realized, sacred in her inaccessibility, a fainter image of that image of her which had been mirrored in the poet's eyes; and this vulgarization of her into flesh and blood seems to pull down the sonnets from heaven's sweetest air to the turbid level of our earthier apprehension. Here is no longer an object for the upward, but for the furtive and sidelong glance. A gentleman once told me that being compelled to part with some family portraits, he requested a dealer to price that of a collateral ancestress by Gainsborough. He thought the sum offered surprisingly small, and said so.

"I beg your pardon for asking the question," said the dealer, "but business is business. You are