ceeded by a Bible reading with him, and then came tea. After tea was evening service in church, and after Sunday supper, he read the Pilgrim's Progress aloud until we had compline in chapel. To fill up intervals we might read certain Sunday books, the more mature successors of Bishop Heber and The Rocky Island and Agathos. No shoal of relaxation emerged from the roaring devotional flood; if at meals the conversation became too secular, it was brought back into appropriate channels; there was even a set of special graces before and after meals to be used on Sunday, consisting of short versicles and responses quite bewildering to any guest staying in the house. No games of any sort or kind were played, not even those which like lawn-tennis or golf entailed no labor on the part of the servants. However fair a snow covered Fir Mount, no toboggan that day made its perilous descent, and though the pond might be spread with delectable ice no skates profaned its satin on the Day of Rest. The Day of Rest in fact, owing chiefly to this prohibition on reasonable relaxation, became a day of pitiless fatigue. We hopped, like "ducks and drakes," from one religious exercise to another, relentlessly propelled.

To my father, I make no doubt, with his intensely devotional mind, this strenuous Sunday was a time of refreshment. It is perfectly true that he often went to sleep in church, and if on very hot Sundays, the walk was abandoned, and we read aloud in turns from some saintly chronicle, under the big cedar on the lawn, not only he, but every member of the family, except the reader (we read in turn), went to sleep, too. But he dozed off to the chronicle of St. Francis and came back to it again; nothing jarred. Thus ordered, Sunday was a perfect day for one of his temperament; no work was done on it, no week-day breeze ruffled its devotional stillness, but his appreciation of it postulated that all of us should share to the full in its spiritual benefits. He did not believe that for himself Sunday could be spent more profitably, and

so we were all swept, regardless of its private effect on us, into the tide. What he did not allow for was that on other temperaments, that which so aptly fulfilled the desires of his own produced a totally different impression. That day, for us, was one of crushing boredom and unutterable fatigue. Certain humorous gleams occasionally relieved the darkness, as when the devil entered into me on one occasion when Lives of the Saints came to me by rotation, for reading aloud. There was the serene sunlight outside the shade of the cedar, positively gilding the tennis court, there was the croquet lawn starving for the crack of balls, and there, too, underneath the cedar was my somnolent family, Hugh with swoony eyes, laden with sleep, Nellie and Maggie1 primly and decorously listening, their eyelids closed, like Miss Matty's because they listened better so, and my father for whom and by whom this treat was arranged, with head thrown back and mouth nakedly open. And then came Satan, or at least Puck. I read four lines of the page to which we had penetrated, then read a few sentences out of the page that had already been read. Deftly and silently, but keeping a prudent finger in the proper place, I turned over a hundred pages, and droned a paragraph about a perfectly different saint. Swiftly turning back I read some few lines out of the introduction to the whole volume, and then, sending prudence to the winds, found the end of the chapter on which we were engaged. I gave them a little more about St. Catherine of Siena, a little more from the introduction, then in case anyone happened to be awake, read the concluding sentences of the chapter about St. Francis and stopped.

The cessation of voice caused Nellie to awake, and with an astounding hypocrisy, subsequently brought home to her, she exclaimed:

"Oh, how interesting."

Her voice aroused my father. There

1Benson's sisters.

we all were sitting under the cedar, reading about St. Francis. Hugh had awoke, Maggie had awoke: it was a peaceful devotional Sunday afternoon.

"Wonderful!" he said. "Is that the end, Fred?"

"Yes, that's all," said Fred.

Fred was also a passive actor in another Sunday humor. My father had noticed in me a certain restlessness at readings, some twitching of the limbs at a Bible lesson, or whatnot, and in order to confirm me in the right practice of the day, had looked out a book in his library about Sunday, which he recommended me to read, without having sufficiently ascertained the contents of it himself. Judge of my rapture when I found a perfectly convincing chapter, showing how the sad, joyless, unrelaxed English Sunday was purely an invention of Puritan times. My father had given me the book to convince me of the antique sanctity of the Addington use: the book told me that from the patristic times onwards, no such idea of Sunday as we religiously practised had ever entered into the heads of Christians, or had ever dawned on the world until the sourness of Puritans robbed the day of its traditional joy. It had been a day of festa, of relaxation from the tedious round of business, and all the faithful dressed themselves in their best clothes for fun, and village sports were held, and hospitality enlivened the drab week. Sure enough they went to church in the morning and after that abandoned themselves to jollity. With suppressed giggles I flew to my mother's room to tell her the result of this investigation, and she steered a course so wonderful that not even then could I chart it. Her sympathetic amusement I knew was all mine, but somehow she abandoned no whit of her loyalty to my father's purpose in giving me the book. I had imagined myself (with rather timorous glee, for which I wanted her support) pronouncing sentence on his Sunday upon the very evidence which he had given me to judge it by, but some consummate stroke of tact on my mother's part made all that to be

quite out of the question. How she did it I have no idea, but surely the very test of tact lies in the fact that you don't know how it is done. Tact explained ceases to be tact, and degenerates into reason on the one hand or futility on the other. Certainly I never confronted my father with this evidence, and Sunday went on precisely as usual. Sometimes Hugh and I played football in the top passage, but you mightn't kick hard for fear of detected reverberations through the skylight of the central hall.

There is a play by some Italian dramatist, which I once saw Dusé act: perhaps it is by D'Annunzio, but I cannot identify it. In the second act anyhow, the curtain went up on Dusé, alone on the stage. She wrote a letter, she put some flowers in a vase without speech, and still without speech, she opened a window at the back, and leaned out of it. She paused long with her back to the audience, and then turning round again said, half below her breath, "Aprile." After that the action of the play proceeded but not till, in that long pause and that one word, she had given us the magic of spring. Not otherwise, but just so, were those Addington holidays, when I was sixteen and seventeen, in April, and thus the magic of spring in those seasons of Christmas and Easter and September came to me. Bulbs and seeds buried in my ground began to spike the earth, and the soft buds and leaves to burst their woolly sheaths. It was the time for the rooting up, in that springgardening, of certain weeds; it was the time also of planting the seedlings which should flower later, and of grafting fresh slips on to a stem that was forming fibre in the place of soft sappy shoots. Above all it was the time of receiving more mature and indelible impressions, and there is scarcely anything which in later life I have loved or hated, or striven for or avoided that is not derivable from some sprig of delight or distaste planted during those seasons of first growth. Childhood and earlier boyhood

were more of a greenhouse, where early growths were nurtured in a warmed windlessness; now they were pricked out and put in the beds, where they had to learn the robustness which would make them resist the inclemencies of a less sheltered life. Some died, scorched by the sun or battered by the rain; the rest, I suppose, had enough vitality to make sun and rain alike serve their growth. Above all it was the time of learning to enjoy, no longer in the absolutely unreflective manner of a child, but in a manner to some extent reasoned and purposed. Some kind of philosophy, some conscious digestive process began to stir below mere receptivity. I looked not only at what

the experiences with which I fed the lusty appetites of life were at the moment, but at the metabolism they would undergo when I had eaten them. But of all mental habits then forming, the one for which I most bless those lovely years, was the habit of enjoyment, of looking for (and finding) in every environment some pleasure and interest. That habit, no doubt, with all our games, our collections, our scribblings had long been churned at: about now it solidified. And by far the most active and assiduous of external agencies that caused this-the dairymaid, so to speak, who was never weary of this magnificent churning-was my mother.

Autobiography and biography are closely related. Both deal with the same sort of material in the same way; that is to say, the subject matter and the method of treatment of each are identical. The purpose of the autobiographer and the biographer is to portray faithfully a personality in all its phases. The danger of presenting an incomplete picture is the more insidious, because unconscious, in the case of autobiography; but it is also the more easily forgiven. The value of a biography, however, is likely to be measured mainly by the comprehensiveness of its scope and the impartiality of its treat

ment.

The chief differences between the two types are due to the point of view. The author of an autobiography is in the position of the gunner who seldom sees the effects of his artillery fire except for a sudden cloud of smoke or spurt of flame. He is intensely concerned with all the details that are involved in the commission of his duty and can, if he will, relate numerous anecdotes of the fray as he sees it. On the other hand he can only guess at the results of his labors, unless some captive balloon signals its observations.

The biographer, however, occupies a position similar to that of one of the ob

servers in the balloon, who from his point of vantage watches the efforts of the artillerymen and notes the effects of their fire. In a like manner he can judge the varied activity of the person whose life he is writing, and estimate the influence. which this individual has exerted upon his environment. If he is a faithful student of human nature, he will also attempt to discover to what extent environment has shaped the man. For instance, Lytton Strachey is not satisfied. merely to trace the course of English policy as grooved by Queen Victoria and her ministers; he also gives us the human side the change which the office of sovereign of England gradually effected in the girl Queen, so long shut away in the seclusion of Kensington with her mother and the ubiquitous Lehzen.

One other factor must be considered in the study of biography. The man who starts to write an account of his own life immediately conditions the time of which he will write-his own age. But the biographer may choose for his subject. either a figure of his own day or an outstanding personage of the past. If he decides to write of a contemporary, as did Boswell, he will be dependent largely upon personal reminiscence, testimony of

friends and relatives, and whatever letters and speeches he can collect. Should his choice light upon a character of an earlier period, he will then have at his disposal the accumulated bulk of critical material that has increased with each new investigation and discovery. Any attempt to proceed without exhaustive study of the sources already available spells failure. On the other hand it would be unwise to accept the testimony thus offered without due consideration of each item in the light of all the material submitted. It is this critical judgment involved in the acceptance or rejection of data which serves in

a large measure as a criterion in giving a biographer his proper rank.

Having once collected his data, the writer has next the task of clothing his figures and facts with the weft of his imaginative genius. He must do this by stressing the human side of his subject, never forgetting that there may be more significance in a single unconscious gesture than in the studied attitude with which a man faces a great crisis. While the latter may give proof of fortitude and will power, the former reveals the native disposition which is the true self.

for which the reason assigned was, that he had company with him; and that at last, when the door opened, out walked Colley Cibber; and that Johnson was so violently provoked when he found for whom he had been so long excluded, that he went away in a passion, and never would return. I remember having mentioned this story to George Lord Lyttelton, who told me, he was very intimate with Lord Chesterfield; and holding it as a wellknown truth, defended Lord Chesterfield by saying, that "Cibber, who had been introduced familiarly by the back-stairs, had probably not been there above ten minutes." It may seem strange even to entertain a doubt concerning a story so long and so widely current, and thus implicitly adopted, if not sanctioned, by the

3 An actor and dramatist of some pretension and less ability, chiefly remembered for An Apology for his Life, a vivid picture of the early eighteenth century theater and drama.

authority which I have mentioned; but Johnson himself assured me, that there was not the least foundation for it. He told me, that there never was any particular incident which produced a quarrel between Lord Chesterfield and him; but that his Lordship's continued neglect was the reason why he resolved to have no connection with him. When the Dictionary was upon the eve of publication, Lord Chesterfield, who, it is said, had flattered himself with expectations that Johnson would dedicate the work to him, attempted, in a courtly manner, to soothe and insinuate himself with the Sage, conscious, as it should seem, of the cold indifference with which he had treated its learned author; and further attempted to conciliate him, by writing two papers in "The World," in recommendation of the work; and it must be confessed, that they contain some studied compliments, so finely turned, that if there had been no previous offence, it is probable that Johnson would have been highly delighted. Praise, in general, was pleasing to him; but by praise from a man of rank and elegant accomplishments, he was peculiarly gratified.

His Lordship says, "I think the publick in general and the republick of letters in particular, are greatly obliged to Mr. Johnson, for having undertaken, and executed so great and desirable a work. Perfection is not to be expected from man: but if we are to judge by the various works of Johnson already published, we have good reason to believe, that he will bring this as near to perfection as any man could do. The plan of it, which he published some years ago, seems to me to be a proof of it. Nothing can be more rationally imagined, or more accurately and elegantly expressed. I therefore recommend the previous perusal of it to all those who intend to buy the Dictionary, and who, I suppose, are all those who can afford it."

"It must be owned, that our language is, at present, in a state of anarchy, and

hitherto, perhaps, it may not have been the worse for it. During our free and open trade, many words and expressions have been imported, adopted, and naturalized from other languages, which have greatly enriched our own. Let it still preserve what real strength and beauty it may have borrowed from others; but let it not, like the Tarpeian maid, be overwhelmed and crushed by unnecessary ornaments. The time for discrimination seems to be now come. Toleration, adoption and naturalization have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary. But where shall we find them, and at the same time, the obedience due to them? We must have recourse to the old Roman expedient in times of confusion, and choose a dictator. Upon this principle, I give my vote for Mr. Johnson, to fill that great and arduous post, and I hereby declare, that I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language, as a free-born British subject, to the said Mr. Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship. Nay more, I will not only obey him like an old Roman, as my dictator, but, like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my pope, and hold him to be infallible while in the chair, but no longer. More than this he cannot well require; for, I presume, that obedience can never be expected, when there is neither terrour to enforce, nor interest to invite it."

"But a Grammar, a Dictionary, and a History of our Language, through its several stages, were still wanting at home, and importunately called for from abroad. Mr. Johnson's labours will now, I dare say, very fully supply that want, and greatly contribute to the farther spreading of our language in other countries. Learners were discouraged, by finding no standard to resort to; and, consequently thought it incapable of any. They will now be undeceived and encouraged."

This courtly device failed of its effect. Johnson, who thought that "all was false and hollow," despised the honeyed