It is then, I think, safe to predict that the real life of Chatham can never be written, as the intimate facts are wanting. What survive were, as usual, exhausted by Macaulay in those two brilliant essays, in which with the sure grasp of historical imagination he depicted the glowing scenes of Chatham's career, and left to posterity the portrait which will never be superseded. For his instinct supplies the lack of evidence, and though there may be exaggeration of praise, that praise will not be seriously diminished. Lives of Chatham will always be written, because few subjects are more interesting or more dramatic, but they must always be imperfect. It is, of course, easy to record his course as a statesman, his speeches, his triumphs, his achievements; and these narratives will be called biographies. But will they ever reveal the real man? There seems to be a constant tendency in writers to forget that the provinces of history and biography, though they often overlap, are essentially distinct; for history records the life of nations, and biography the life of individuals. To set forth the annals of the time in which the hero has existed, and to note his contact with them, is only a part of his life, though it is often held to be all that is worth remembering. The life of any man that ever lived on earth is far more than his public career. The life of a man is not his public life, which is always alloyed with some necessary diplomacy and which is sometimes only a mask; it is made up of a thousand touches, a multitude of lights and shadows, most of which are invisible behind the austere presentment of statecraft. We have probably all, and perhaps more than all, that Shakespeare ever wrote; we have so to speak all his public life. But would we not gladly give one or two of his plays to obtain some true insight into his private life, to realise the humanity of this superhuman being, to know how this immortal was linked to mortality? We want to know how a master man talked, and, if possible, what he thought; what was his standpoint with regard to the grave issues of life; what he was in his hours of ease, what he enjoyed, how he unbent; in a word, what he was without his wig and bag and sword, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with a friend, a novel, or a pipe. This is half or three parts of a man, and it is certain that we shall never know this aspect of Chatham. He would no doubt, had it served his purpose, have appeared in the dressing-gown and slippers, but the array would have been as solemn and artificial as the robes of a cardinal. He would, had it served his purpose, have smoked a pipe, but it would have been the jewelled nargileh of the Grand Mogul. He had practically no intimates; his wife told nothing, his children told nothing; he revealed himself neither by word nor on paper, he deliberately enveloped himself in an opaque fog of mystery; and there seems no clue or channel by which any further detail