crowd. The executioner fainted after the blow, and the under hangman was ordered to take his place. He was not wanted. Maria was already gone: her body was found as cold as if she had been dead for some hours. The flower had been snapt in the storm, before the scythe of violence could come near it,

ESSAY II.

The History of Times representeth the magnitude of actions and the public faces or deportment of persons, and passeth over in silence the smaller passages and motions of men and matters. But such being the workmanship of God, that he doth hang the greatest weight upon the smallest wires, maxima e minimis suspendens: it comes therefore to pass, that Histories do rather set forth the pomp of business than the true and inward resorts thereof. But Lives, if they be well written, propounding to themselves a person to represent in whom actions both greater and smaller, public and private, have a commixture, must of necessity contain a more true, native, and lively representation.-LORD BACON.

MANKIND in general are so little in the habit of looking steadily at their own meaning, or of weighing the words by which they express it, that the writer, who is careful to do both, will sometimes mislead his readers through the

very excellence which qualifies him to be their instructor: and this with no other fault on his part, than the modest mistake of supposing in those, to whom he addresses himself, an intellect as watchful as his own. The inattentive Reader adopts as unconditionally true, or perhaps rails at his Author for having stated as such, what upon examination would be found to have been duly limited, and would so have been understood, if opaque spots and false refractions were as rare in the mental as in the bodily eye. The motto, for instance, to this Paper has more than once served as an excuse and authority for huge volumes of biographical minutiæ, which render the real character almost invisible, like clouds of dust on a portrait, or the counterfeit frankincense which smoke-blacks the favorite idol of a Catholic village. Yet Lord Bacon, by the words which I have marked in italics, evidently confines the Biographer to such facts as are either susceptible of some useful general inference, or tend to illustrate those qualities which distinguished the subject of them from ordinary men; while the passage in general was meant

to guard the Historian against considering, as trifles, all that might appear so to those who recognize no greatness in the mind, and can conceive no dignity in any incident, which does not act on their senses by its external accompaniments, or on their curiosity by its immediate consequences. Things apparently insignificant are recommended to our notice, not for their own sakes, but for their bearings or influences on things of importance: in other words, when they are insignificant in appearance only.

An inquisitiveness into the minutest circumstances and casual sayings of eminent contemporaries, is indeed quite natural; but so are all our follies, and the more natural they are, the more caution should we exert in guarding against them. To scribble trifles even on the perishable glass of an inn window, is the mark of an idler; but to engrave them on the marble monument, sacred to the memory of the departed Great, is something worse than idleness. The spirit of genuine Biography is in nothing more conspicuous, than in the firmness with which it withstands the cravings of

worthless curiosity, as distinguished from the thirst after useful knowledge. For, in the first place, such anecdotes as derive their whole and sole interest from the great name of the person concerning whom they are related, and neither illustrate his general character nor his particular actions, would scarcely have been noticed or remembered except by men of weak minds: it is not unlikely therefore, that they were misapprehended at the time, and it is most probable that they have been related as incorrectly, as they were noticed injudiciously. Nor are the consequences of such garulous Biography merely negative. For as insignificant stories can derive no real respectability from the eminence of the person who happens to be the subject of them, but rather an additional deformity of disproportion, they are apt to have their insipidity seasoned by the same bad passions that accompany the habit of gossiping in general; and the misappre hensions of weak men meeting with the misinterpretations of malignant men, have not seldom formed the ground work of the most grievous calumnies. In the second place, these