That biography is an art is proved by the admittedly great examples. The novelist who creates a fictitious biography has no more difficult and delicate task than the biographer who finds in a real life story the true character of a man, and gives to the events which produced the character artistic form, unity, and movement. Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson” and Robert Southey’s “Life of Lord Nelson” are as beautifully designed as the best novels. Boswell’s masterpiece resembles a realistic novel and Southey’s “Nelson” is like a romantic tale of chivalry and heroism. Benjamin Jowett, the great professor of Greek at Oxford, said that biography is the best material for ethical teaching. In many ways it is the best material for all kinds of teaching. For everything that human beings have done and thought is to be found in the life stories of interesting individuals, so that biography opens the way to every subject. In our discussion of history we said that the directest path to the heart of an historical epoch is through the biography of an important figure or a wise observer of that epoch. There is no better political history of America during the Civil War than Nicolay and Hay’s “Life of Lincoln.” Grant’s “Memoirs” contains all that an ordinary reader needs to know of the movements of the Northern armies after Grant took command. The memoirs and reminiscences of Davis and Confederate generals give us an adequate account of the civil and military movements of the Southern side. Carlyle’s “Cromwell,” no matter how biased and overwrought it seems to discriminating students, will open the seventeenth century for those of us who cannot be specialists in history. Bourrienne’s “Memoirs of Napoleon,” in the English translation, is a good introduction to the history of Europe during the Napoleonic wars (and it makes little difference to us that the book was largely rewritten and augmented by the French editor). Morley’s “Life of Gladstone” is a history of Victorian England. The life of Luther is the heart of the Protestant Reformation. The layman who would know something of the tendencies of modern science cannot do better than to read the biographies of men of science in which sympathetic pupils have told in a style more simple than the masters’ treatises the intellectual principles and human conditions of the masters’ work. Such biographies are the “Life and Letters” of Darwin, of Huxley, of Agassiz. The “Life of Pasteur” by Valery-Radot, which has been translated into English, is a clear account of the main tendencies of modern medicine, the subject that all the world is so much interested in. Anyone who reads it will know better how to make his way through the masses of popular articles on medicine and public health in the current magazines.