We
have the pensioned and petted life of the rough and contemptuous man
of genius,--whose great renown in English literature, by-the-by, is
owing far more to that garrulous admirer of his than to his own
works,--but we have little or nothing about those days of study or
struggle when he taught and flogged little boys, or felt all the
contumely excited by his shabby habiliments, or knocked down his
publisher, or slept at night with a hungry stomach on a bulkhead in
the company of the poor poet Savage. All the racier and stronger part
of the man's history is slurred over. No doubt he would not encourage
any prying into it, and neither cared to remember it himself nor
wished others 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. Others, feeling a similar horror, and some of them conscious
of the enmities they should leave behind them, have themselves
written the obscurer portions of their own lives, like Hume, Gibbon,
Gifford, Scott, Moore, Southey. These men must have felt, that, even
at best, and with the fairest intentions, the task of the biographer
is full of difficulties, and open to mistakes, uncertainties, and
false conclusions without number.
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