BIOGRAPHY, that form of history which is applied, not to races or masses of men, but to an individual. The idea of the dis tinction between biography and history is a modern thing; we speak of "antique biography," but it is doubtful whether any writer of antiquity, even Plutarch, clearly perceived its possible existence as an independent branch of literature. All of them, and Plutarch certainly, considered the writing of a man's life as an opportunity for celebrating, in his person, certain definite moral qualities. It was in these, and not in the individual characteristics of the man, that his interest as a subject of biography resided. The true conception of biography, therefore, as the faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life, is very modern. We may question whether it existed, save in rare and accidental instances, until the i7th century. The personage described was, in earlier times, treated either from the philosophical or from the historical point of view. In the former case, rhetoric inevitably clouded the definiteness of the picture; the object was to produce a grandiose moral effect, to clothe the subject with all the virtues or with all the vices; to make his career a splendid example or else a solemn warning. The consequence is that we have to piece together unconsidered incidents and the accidental record of fea tures in order to obtain an approximate estimate. We may believe, for instance, that a faithful and unprejudiced study of the emperor Julian, from the life, would be a very different thing from the impression left upon us by the passions of Cyril or of Theodoret. In considering what biography, in its pure sense, ought to be, we must insist on what it is not. It is not a philo sophical treatise nor a polemical pamphlet. It is not, even, a por tion of the human contemporary chronicle. Broad views are en tirely out of place in biography, and there is perhaps no greater literary mistake than to attempt what is called the "Life and Times" of a man. In an adequate record of the "times," the man is bound to sink into insignificance ; even a "Life and Times" of Napoleon I. would be an impossible task. It fills its canvas with one figure, and other personages, however great in them selves, must always be subsidiary to the central hero. The only remnant of the old rhetorical purpose of "lives" which clearer modern purpose can afford to retain is the relative light thrown on military or intellectual or social genius by the achievements of the selected subject. Even this must be watched with great care, lest the desire to illuminate that genius, and make it con sistent, should lead the biographer to gloss over frailties or ob scure irregularities. In the old "lives" of great men, this is precisely what was done. If the facts did not lend themselves to the great initial thesis, so much the worse for them. They must be ignored or falsified, since the whole object of the work was to "teach a lesson," to magnify a certain, tendency of conduct. It was very difficult to persuade the literary world that, whatever biography is, it is not an opportunity for panegyric or invective, and the lack of this perception destroys our faith in most of the records of personal life in ancient and mediaeval times. It is impossible to avoid suspecting that Suetonius loaded his canvas with black in order to excite hatred against the Roman emperors; it is still more difficult to accept more than one page in three of the stories of the professional hagiographers. As long as it was a pious merit to deform the truth, biography could not hope to flourish.
Among the ancients, biography was not specifically cultivated until comparatively later times. The lost "Lives" of Critias were probably political pamphlets. We meet first with deliberate bi ography in Xenophon's memoirs of Socrates, a work of epoch making value. Towards the close of the 1st century, Plutarch wrote one of the most fascinating books in the world's literature, his Parallel Lives of 46 Greeks and Romans. In later Greek, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana was written by Philostratus, who also produced Lives of the Sophists. In the 3rd century, Dio genes Laertius compiled a Lives of the Philosophers, which is of greater interest than a Lives of the Sophists composed zoo years later by Eunapius. Finally in the loth century, Suidas added a biographical section to his celebrated Lexicon. In Latin literature, the earliest biography we meet with is the fragment of the Illus trious Men of Cornelius Nepos. Memoirs began to be largely written at the close of the Augustan age, but these, like the Life of Alexander the Great, by Q. Curtius Rufus, were rather his torical than biographical. Tacitus composed a life of his father-in law, Agricola; this is a work of the most elegant and stately beauty. Suetonius was the author of several biographical com pilations, of which the Lives of the Twelve Caesars is the best known; this was produced in the year 12o. Marius Maximus, in the 4th century, continued the series of emperors down to Heliogabalus, but his work has not been preserved. The Augustan History, finished under Constantine, takes its place, and was con cluded and edited by Flavius Vopiscus.
English Biographies.—Biography hardly begins to exist in English literature until the close of the reign of Henry VIII. William Roper (1496-1578) wrote a touching life of his father in-law, Sir Thomas More, and George Cavendish (1500-61?), a memoir of Cardinal Wolsey which is a masterpiece of liveliness and grace. It is with these two works, both of which remained in manuscript until the 17th century, that biography in England begins. The lives of English writers compiled by John Bale are much more primitive and slight. John Leland (d. 1552) and John Pits (156o-1616) were antiquaries who affected a species of biography. In the early part of the 17th cen tury, the absence of the habit of memoir writing extremely im poverishes our knowledge of the illustrious authors of the age, of none of whom are there preserved such records as our curiosity would delight in. The absence of any such chronicle was felt, and two writers, Thomas Heywood and Sir Aston Cokayne, proposed to write lives of the poets of their time. Unfortunately they never carried their plans into execution. The pioneer of deliberate English biography was Izaak Walton, who in 1640, published a Life of Donne, followed in 1651 by that of Sir Henry Wotton, in 1665 by that of Richard Hooker, in 1670 by that of George Her bert, and in 1678 by that of Dr. Robert Saunderson. These five reprinted, under the title of Walton's Lives, were not only charm ing in themselves, but the forerunners of a whole class of English literature. Meanwhile, Fuller was preparing his History of the Worthies of England, which appeared after his death, in 1662, and John Aubrey (1626-97) was compiling his Minutes of Lives, which show such a perfect comprehension of the personal element that should underlie biography; these have only in our own days been completely given to the public. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), wrote a brilliant autobiography, first printed in 1764; that of Anne Harrison, Lady Fanshawe (1625 168o), remained unknown until 1829. A very curious essay in bio graphy is the memoir of Colonel John Hutchinson, written by his widow, Lucy, between 1664 and 1671. Margaret Lucas, duchess of Newcastle (1624?-74), wrote her own life (1656) and that of her duke (1667) . The Athenae Oxonienses of Anthony a Wood (1632-95) was a complicated celebration of the wit, wisdom and learning of Oxford notabilities since the Reformation. In 1668 Thomas Sprat (1635-1713) wrote a Life of Cowley, which was very much admired and which exercised for many years a baneful influence on British biography. Sprat considered that all familiar anecdote and picturesque detail should be omitted in the corn position of a memoir, and that moral effect and a solemn vague ness should be aimed at. The celebrated funeral orations of Jer emy Taylor were of the same order of eloquence, and the wind of those grandiose compositions destroyed the young shoot of genuine and simple biography which had budded in Walton and Aubrey.
From this time forth, for more than half a century, English biography became a highly artificial and rhetorical thing, lacking all the salient features of honest portraiture. William Oldys (1696-1761) was the first to speak out boldly; in 1747, in the preface to the Biographia Britannica, he pointed out "the cruelty, we might even say the impiety, of sacrificing the glory of great characters to trivial circumstances and mere conveniency," and attacked the timid and scrupulous superficiality of those who undertook to write lives of eminent men, while omitting every thing which gave definition to the portrait. In 1753 the Lives of the Poets, which bore the name of Theophilus Cibber (2703-58), but was mainly written by Robert Shiels (d. 1753), gave a great deal of valuable information with regard to the personal adven tures of our writers. Dr. Johnson's Life of Savage (1744), though containing some passages of extreme interest, was a work of im perfect form, but Mason's Life and Letters of Gray (17 74) marks a great advance in the art of biography. This was the earliest memoir in which correspondence of a familiar kind was used to illustrate and to expand the narrative, and Mason's Gray is really the pioneer of almost all modern English biography. For the first time it was now admitted that letters to intimate friends, not written with a view to publication, might be used with advantage to illustrate the real character of the writer. Boswell, it is certain, availed himself of Mason's example, while improving upon it, and in 1 791 he published his Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, which is the most interesting example of biography existing in English or perhaps in any language.
As soon as the model of Boswell became familiar to biographers it could no longer be said that any secret in the art was left un known to them, and the biographies of the 19th century are all more or less founded upon the magnificent type of the Life of Johnson. But few have even approached it in courage, pictur esqueness or mastery of portraiture. In the next generation Southey's lives of Nelson (1813) and John Wesley (1820) at once became classics; but the pre-eminent specimen of early 19th cen tury biography is Lockhart's superb Life of Sir Walter Scott . The biographies of the 19th century are far too numer ous to be mentioned here in detail; in the various articles dedicated to particular men and women in this Encyclopædia, the date and authorship of the authoritative life of each person will in most cases to be found appended.
In mediaeval and Renaissance France there existed numerous memoirs and histories, such as those of Brantome, into which the lives of great men were inserted, and in which a biographical char acter was given to studies of virtue and valour, or of the reverse. But the honour of being the earliest deliberate contribution to biography is generally given to the Acta Sanctorum, compiled by the Bollandists, the first volume of which appeared in 1653. It was confined to the lives of saints and martyrs, but in 1674 Louis Moreri, in his Grand Dictionnaire, included a biographical section of a general character. But the earliest biographical dictionary which had anything of a modern form was the celebrated Diction naire historique et critique of Pierre Bayle, in 1696; the lives in this great work, however, are too often used as mere excuses for developing the philosophical and controversial views of the author; they are nevertheless the result of genuine research and have a true biographical view.
In Italian literature, biography does not take a prominent place until the 15th century. The Lives of Illustrious Florentines, in which a valuable memoir of Dante occurs, was written in Latin by Filippo Villani. Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421-98) compiled a set of biographies of his contemporaries, which are excellent of their kind. The so-called Life of Castruccio Castracani, by Machiavelli, is hardly a biography, but a brilliant essay on the ideals of statecraft. Paolo Giovio (1483-1552) wrote the lives of poets and soldiers whom he had known. All these attempts, how ever, seem insignificant by the side of the autobiography of Ben venuto Cellini (1501-71), confessedly one of the most entertaining works of the world's literature. A great deal of biography is scat tered throughout the historical compilations of the Italian Renais sance, and the Lives of the Artists, by Giorgio Vasari is a storehouse of anecdotes admirably told. We find nothing else that requires special mention till we reach the memoir-writers of the i8th century, with the autobiographies of Count Carlo Gozzi and Alfieri ; and on the whole, Italy, although adopting in the 19th century the habit of biography, has rarely excelled in it.
In Spanish literature Fernan Perez de Guzman with great originality, enshrined, in his Generations and Like nesses, a series of admirable literary portraits; he has been called the Plutarch of Spain. But, in spite of numerous lives of saints, poets and soldiers, Spanish literature has not excelled in biog raphy, nor has it produced a single work of this class which is universally read. In Germany there is little to record before the close of the i8th century.
In the course of the i 9th century a new thing in biography was invented, in the shape of dictionaries of national biography. Of these, the first which was carried to a successful conclusion was the Swedish (1835-57), which occupied 23 volumes. This dictionary was followed by the Dutch (1852-78), in 24 volumes; the Austrian (1856-91), in 35 volumes; the Belgian (which was begun in 1866) ; the German (1875-1900), in 45 volumes; and others, representing nearly all the countries of Europe. England was behind the competitors named above, but when she joined the ranks a work was produced the value of which can hardly be exaggerated. The project was started in 1882 by the publisher George Smith (1824-1901), who consulted Leslie Stephen. The first volume of the English Dictionary of National Biography was published on Jan. 1, 1885, under Stephen's editorship. A volume was published quarterly, with complete punctuality until midsum mer 1900, when vol. 63 closed the work, which was presently ex tended by the issue of supplementary volumes. In May 1891 Leslie Stephen resigned the editorship and was succeeded by Sid ney Lee, who edited the work with its supplementary volumes till 1916, when it was transferred to the Oxford University Press. A further supplementary volume containing the biographies of those who had died between 1912 and 1921 was published in 1927 under the editorship of H. W. C. Davis and J. R. H. Weaver. The Dictionary of National Biography contains the lives of be tween 30,00o and 40,00o persons.
Biography is a branch of literature; that is to say, it is an art, not a science. The biographies that succeed are those that people are always ready to read for the kind of pleasure given by literary art. The biographies that fail are those that do not give that pleasure. It is necessary to affirm these elementary truths, be cause the present age, weak in creative energy, tends to exalt the merely explanatory or sceptical activities, and shows a desire to claim that biography is a branch of science or a department of morbid psychology. That an art is promoted by being called a science is a superstition of persons, often very learned, who possess apparatus, but lack creative vigour.
We must beware, therefore, of those who confuse a plain case by the introduction of misleading qualifications. No biographer can claim merit by urging that his work is in some special sense "new" or "modern." A "new" or "modern" biography can only mean a "recent" biography. If a youthful iconoclast writes a hostile life of Scott as a counterblast to Lockhart, the differentia of his book will be hostility, not novity or modernity. Nor will the hostility be necessarily a merit or a defect. A hostile biography, like any other, must justify itself by success, that is, by giving pleasure to generations of readers. Actually, a perverse biography that tries to belittle some large figure (e.g., Dickens) is as un likely to succeed as the inverse biography that tries to magnify a minor figure (e.g., George IV.) .
The Descent from Johnson.—The publication in 1918 of Eminent Victorians by Giles Lytton Strachey gave some encour agement to those who fail to distinguish between malice and ve racity. Though generally labelled "new" and "modern," it descends in a direct line from the work of the greatest of English biog raphers, himself, by singular coincidence, the subject of the greatest of English biographies (see JOHNSON; BOSWELL). The opening lines of Johnson's Life of Cowley are so cogent that no excuse need be made for quoting them: The Life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biog raphy, has been written by Dr. Sprat ; ... but his zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history : he has given the character, not the life of Cowley ; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely anything is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyrick.
The first sentences of the actual Life read thus: Abraham Cowley was born in the year one thousand six hundred and eighteen. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a citizen.
By "character" Johnson means something like the Theophrastian "character" (see THEOPHRASTUS) which was vastly popular in England during the i7th century—the description of supposed types, such as the abstract "just man," "avaricious man," and so forth, instead of real individuals. The "character" always tends to become a model or vehicle of insincerity or hypocrisy, that is, of suppression and pretence. The father of a "character" is never a grocer, but a citizen. Hypocrisy was the moral and intellectual habit of so many vigorously respectable people during the Vic torian and Albertine age that the "character" biography became a natural expectation. The admission of human weakness or nat ural frailty was resented as if it were a malicious perversion of the truth. Thus, the .4.1Iemoirs (1851) of his famous uncle, by Bishop Christopher Wordsworth (q.v.), suppressed certain vital incidents of the poet's early life as being out of the "character." Thus, too, the terribly competent and imperious Florence Night ingale, the rightly unscrupulous organizer of victory in a sacri ficed region of warfare, had to be presented to sentimental com placency as the exquisite "Lady with the Lamp," the scarcely earthly ministering angel. Now any representation of Florence Nightingale as a delicate, docile lady in the dove-like raiment of "the Nurse," is not only a misrepresentation of the facts, but a positive insult to her remarkable achievement. It is the Theo phrastian "character" run mad.
The frank casting of biographical material into the form of a novel may be felicitous when the subject is Shelley and the writer Andre Maurois (Ariel, 1923). On the other hand, the sedu lous denigration of Dickens in a novel This Side Idolatry by C. Bechhofer Roberts (1928) is offensive, not for moral reasons, but because the representation, however supported by evidence, is irrelevant. There is no law in the matter. Biographical fiction can hardly be forbidden when historical fiction is allowed. A novelist has at least as much right as a dramatist to the life of Abraham Lincoln. In Venetia Disraeli succeeded in transmitting much of Byron, but failed to transmit anything of Shelley, as Peacock had failed before him, in the caricature of Nightmare Abbey. Some of Disraeli's other "real" characters in fiction are admirable, e.g., the sketch of Palmerston as Lord Roehamp ton in Endymion. The life of Disraeli himself by Andre Maurois (1927) tells a story as fascinating as a novel, without depart ing from the normal frame-work of a biography. Other suc cessful examples of what may be called essential biography are the Parnell of St. John Ervine (1925) and the Palmer ston of Philip Guedalla (1926). Brilliant and personal as the latter is, it rests upon a solid foundation of research. To say that the Kaiser Wilhelm II., the Napoleon and the Bismarck of Emil Lud wig are "film-biographies" is not in the least to disparage them, for there are excellent as well as execrable films. Of these three the Bismarck is the most satisfying, but not the most attractive; for though the author triumphs over his material, the subject itself lacks spectacular appeal. The qualities that made Emil Ludwig successful as the biographer of Napoleon or the Kaiser disable him utterly when he attempts a life of Jesus.
An even more remarkable instance of the devotion which is ex-pended upon the collection and recording of personal detail is the Life of Beethoven, by William Alexander Thayer, for here the biographer pursues the man so earnestly that he overlooks the musician, who, after all, is what matters most.
There is, as we have said, no formula for biography; there is only the pragmatic test of success. Even the standard "life" in two volumes .need not be, though it often has been, an expanded epitaph in the lapidary style of the monumental mason. What the best biographical writing of recent times can truthfully claim is that it has turned wholesomely away from the falsified "char acter" and the exaggerated "funeral oration," and has tried to depict human beings instead of frigid types "shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyrick." As examples of modern biographical activity we may mention that the Dictionary of National Biography continues its career of plain usefulness and that the classic series called English Alen of Letters has entered upon a third and less classic phase of its welcome existence.
We do find extended biographical work, however, in that curious jumble of fact, tradition and personal prejudice—Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), in which are sections devoted to the lives of the governors and names of the magistrates "that have been shields to the churches of New England," to famous ministers and to the history of Harvard college and of "some eminent persons therein educated." Nevertheless in spite of such spirited bits of narrative as Sir William Phips' finding of long buried Spanish treasure under the sea, the pompous style and moralizing treatment have on the whole won deserved oblivion. Almost complete oblivion has also overtaken the single biographies produced in the colonial epoch—Parentator (1724), the quaint tribute to Increase Mather by his more famous son ; The Life and Character of the Reverend Benjamin Colman, D.D. (r 749) by his son-in-law, Ebenezer Turell, one of the most unassuming and appealing of the group; and Jonathan Edwards' life of David Brainerd (1749), a young missionary who died of consumption.
During the Revolution writers and thinkers were too occupied with waging war on live questions to extol the virtues and accom plishments of dead dignitaries. What few semi-biographical notes were struck were satirical—thinly veiled allusions to prominent members of the opposite party such as are found in Mercy Otis Warren's farce The Group (1775)—or incidental—the acrid sketches in her History of the American Revolution (1805) . After the Revolution, however, emphasis shifted from the divines who had absorbed the attention of writers to the great patriotic figures who were already assuming heroic proportions. The Life of Washington (180o) by Parson Weems, a versatile and somewhat unscrupulous man, although it was regarded askance even by con temporary scholars, proved one of the best-selling biographies ever written in America and imbedded in the popular mind fic tions like the hatchet story which have not yet been wholly up rooted. Also inaccurate was the Life of Patrick Henry (1817) by William Wirt (1772-1834), lawyer and essayist, whose polished style makes the book more readable, however, than the Life of James Otis (1823) by William Tudor (1779-183o) or the pon derous Life of Washington (1804–o7) by Chief Justice John Marshall.
One of the first tributes to American writers was the some what stilted and inaccurate Life of Charles Brockden Brown (1815) by William Dunlap (1766-1839), playwright, manager, so-called "Father of the American Theatre." Edgar Allan Poe indulged in literary chit-chat in his Literati of New York City (1846), and his own literary executor, Rufus Griswold by his distorted memoir of the poet (1849) gave one of the most prominent examples of the satisfaction of personal grudges which for a period blackened American biography. The best biographical work which came out of New York at that time (and probably the best biographical work in America to date) was the Spanish series of Irving and his last work The Life of Washington (1855- 59). The opportunities he had to examine Spanish source mate rials and to imbibe the atmosphere of the places about which he wrote as well as the suavity of his style and the general pictur esqueness of his theme and treatment caused his History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), according to Southey, to place him "in the front rank of modern biographers" and to secure him, according to Edward Everett, the position "of founder of the American school of polite learning." Although Cooper took time off from his fiction to write Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers (1842-45) and Ned Myers (1843), the life of a common sailor who had been with him on the "Sterling," and although his Leatherstocking series wielded an extraordinary influence on most of the later scout biographies, for work of a sort to compare with Irving we must turn to the New England school. There Jared Sparks, for a time editor of the North American Review, professor of history and later president of Harvard, not only wrote numerous biographies himself but edited the most extensive work of its nature to date, American Biography, which appeared in two series (25 vol., 38 and 1844-47) and which still has value. The literary contacts of Boston, Cambridge and Concord through the latter part of the 19th century brought forth numerous biographies on a compara tively high level. Emerson's tribute to Thoreau (1862), Charles Eliot Norton's biographies and editions of the literary remains of his various friends, the work of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, O. W. Holmes' biographies of Emerson (1885) and Motley (1879), the memoirs of the Transcendentalists, although they have their blemishes, are generally satisfactory. About the same time in the South John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870), lawyer, poli tician, essayist and novelist in his Memoirs of the Life of William I'Virt (1849) carried on the biographical tradition ; and the pro lific Simms turned off lives of Francis Marion (1844), John Smith (1846) and Nathanael Greene (1849). In the West Timothy Flint by his biography of Boone (1833) and Benjamin Drake by that of Black Hawk (1838) established the biographical tradition of the Frontier.
By the third quarter of the 19th century, then, biography had become well established as a popular form in the United States, and works of this nature issued from the publishers in ever increasing volume. It is possible only to indicate the chief of the lines of development, many of the outstanding biographies being named in the bibliographies of the individuals whom they con cern. One rather common type was the so-called "family biog raphy" in which the children or near relatives of an individual, having free access to his or her papers and intimate knowledge, present their impressions. Of such a nature were biographies of Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Hawthorne, of Julia Ward Howe, of Emily Dickinson and many others. Horace Traubel's devotion to Whitman resulting in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906 et seq.) furnishes perhaps the best example of the Boswell type of biography. The secretaries of Lincoln, John Hay (1838-1905) and John G. Nicolay (1832-1901) produced in their life of the president (1890) what is not only one of the most comprehensive of American biographies but a book which serves as a history of an epoch. This same use of history on a smaller scale to serve as the background of a central figure is found in W. P. Trent's biography of William Gilmore Simms (1892). A specialized type of biography, the campaign biography written to serve an imme diate end—exalting a candidate—has numbered in its ranks no lesser figures than Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Dean Howells.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 2oth centuries, with the exception of accounts based on personal association, biography fell largely to the lot of the professional editor, the studious minister, the college professor and the aspirants for doc toral honours. Their work had the merit of being almost without exception more accurate than that of the earlier annalists, and while at its worst it was dry and over-pedantic, it was as a rule well written and thorough. Among the best examples of this type of work is the American Men of Letters series edited by Charles Dudley Warner, the biographies of Horace E. Scudder (1838 1902), of M. A. De Wolfe Howe (1864– ) and of William Roscoe Thayer (1859-1923).
In the 2oth century the broad and even path that the American biographer was complacently treading, however, suddenly branched off at strange tangents. The scholar, the dignified editor of the old school, was jostled by novelists, poets, short-story writers, psycho analysts, bent on probing the dark recesses of the soul. Lucky are the buried notables who escape without being proved victims of one complex or phobia, and lucky are the descendants who need fear the revelation of no family skeletons. For the so-called "new biography" like the realism of the Zola school does not believe in reticences; sometimes it seems almost to glory in pillorying the past. The chatty, personal, vivid note popularized in biography by Strachey in England, Ludwig in Germany, Andre Maurois in France, and Gamaliel Bradford (1863-1932) in America, com mendable in itself, has given rise in some cases to serious abuses. Spice has been sought to the neglect of truth; a biographer, intent on dragging from his pedestal an over-idealized hero or on playing up a side of his subject that has been neglected or glossed over is apt to forget his sense of proportion, to stress that side to the ex clusion of all others, and sometimes, unconsciously perhaps, to twist the evidence.
In spite of these abuses, however, the advantages of the new biography are many. Written usually with a sense of climax and an admirable dramatic quality, these books have made vastly more vital and interesting the people they portray ; they have increased the reading public devoted to this genre ; they have done good service in insisting upon the truth without fear or favour. No one now need come to the reading of biography as to a task; Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln, the Prairie Years (1926) is the work of a poet and mystic profoundly in sympathy with his subject; Cameron Rogers' The Magnificent Idler (1926) makes Walt Whitman almost a hero of romance ; Emerson (1927) by Van Wyck Brooks (1886– ), re-creates in vivid, staccato fashion the Concord sage's life and environment.
At the present time the outlook for American biography seems bright. Under the pioneer leadership of Ambrose W. Vernon (187o– ) courses in biography are being given in some American colleges. The interest in social history has drawn atten tion to many representative figures hitherto neglected; the State historical societies are preserving records of the more significant local personages ; and The Dictionary of American Biography, financed by Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, promises to be the most complete and correct collection of American biography yet published. (D. A. D.) BIOLOGICAL AND ZOOLOGICAL ARTICLES. The main branches of biological science are dealt with in special articles such as ZOOLOGY, EMBRYOLOGY and PALAEONTOLOGY.