Anecdotes, like most other forms of literary entertainment, have been spoken ill of by grave persons, but seldom by the wise. “How superficial,” wrote Isaac Disraeli, “is that cry of some impertinent pretended geniuses of these times who affect to exclaim, ‘Give me no anecdotes of an author, but give me his works!’ I have often found the anecdotes more interesting than the works.” And he pointed out that “Dr. Johnson devoted one of his periodical papers to a defence of anecdotes.” The defence was hardly needed. The imagination of mankind has by universal consent paid honour to the anecdote, and Montaigne is supreme among essayists, and Plutarch among biographers, by virtue of anecdotes as well as of wisdom. Plutarch himself has given the anecdote its just praise in the opening paragraph of his life of Alexander, when he explains: “It is not Histories I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice--nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fell, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.” Hence the general appetite for trifling facts about great men is not a mere vice of gossips. It may help to preserve a detail which will give a later man of genius a clue to a character--the character of a man or the character of a book. The theory that we can criticise a poet more profoundly by leaving aside the ordinary facts of his life as though he had never existed in the flesh is an absurd piece of pedantry. The life of Shelley throws a flood of light on the poetry of Shelley. It contains in itself a profound criticism of the genius of Shelley--a genius that was of the air rather than of the earth--a genius at once noble and incongruous with the world in which men live. Writers, however, may make a dozen different uses of anecdotes. The anecdote may be anything from a jest to an awakening touch of portraiture, and from that to a fable that reveals a piece of new or old truth to the imagination. It is not open to dispute that the great writers of anecdotes are not those who believe in anecdotes for anecdotes’ sake. They are those who everywhere see signs and connections, and for whom an anecdote is a pattern in little suggesting a pattern of life itself. Plutarch speaks of himself as looking for “the signs of the soul in men,” and the phrase gives some notion of the moral and spiritual pattern into which his anecdotes are woven.