History has improved in its morals, if not in its manners, and scientific biography is making some headway. But biography is still in a hazy state of legend and myth. Approach any man you choose, especially among men of letters who have been written about by other men of letters, and you find a mass of conjecture and legend masquerading as fact. Sometimes there is an added garment of disguise, the dignified gown of science and scholarship. No great writer has suffered from credulous and weak-principled biographers so much as the greatest of all--Shakespeare. Most of the lives of him are gigantic myths, built on hardly as many known facts as would fill two pages of this book. Of late historians and men of science have begun to laugh at literary biographers for making such confusion of the institution of Shakespeare biography. It is well enough for the young reader to learn carefully the biographical notes prefixed to the school editions of Shakespeare, for the better the young reader learns school exercises and the notes in the text books, the better basis he has for reading and thinking for himself. I may say, however, that there are at present, so far as I know, only two books on the life of Shakespeare which are trustworthy, Halliwell-Phillips’s “Outlines,” which gives all the documents, and a recent masterly discussion of the documents by George G. Greenwood called “The Shakespeare Problem Restated.” It is a problem and not one for us to go into here except that it illustrates what we are saying about scientific and fanciful biography. I should not wonder if another generation were more interested than our fathers have been in the poetic achievements, whatever they are, of the man whose youthful portrait is on the cover of this book--Francis Bacon. One thing is certain: the rising generation had better learn early to approach with caution and tolerant scepticism books bearing such titles as “Shakespeare, Man, Player and Poet,” “Shakespeare, His Life, His Mind and His Art.” We had better bend our attentions to the plays themselves, and when we wish to read _about_ Shakespeare, turn not to the so-called biographies and “studies in Shakespeare” by college professors, but to the great critics, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Pater. As we said that we, mere readers, should leave scientific history in the hands of specialists, so we may leave the problems of literary biography to expert investigators. We are interested rather in that kind of biography which is as old as the earliest legends of heroes, that which celebrates the great ones of the earth. If it is true to fact so much the better; but since biographers are likely to be the friends, kinsmen, admirers of their subjects, biography will be the last division of history to be informed with the scientific spirit. And so far as it is an art, it will err on the right side, like fiction and poetry, by presenting an ennobled view of human nature.