It is a sign of race in literature that a book can spare what is private to its author, and comes at last to forgo his earth-life altogether. This is obvious of works of knowledge, since positive truth gains nothing from personality, but feels it as an alloy; and a wise analysis will affirm the same of all long-lived books. Works of science are charters of nature, and submit to no human caprice; and, in a similar way, works of imagination, which are to the inward world of the spirit what works of science are to the natural universe, are charters of the soul, and borrow nothing from the hand that wrote them. How deciduous such books are of the private life needs only to be stated to be allowed. They cast biography from them like the cloak of the ascending prophet. An author is not rightly to be reckoned among immortals until he has been forgotten as a man, and become a shade in human memory, the myth of his own work. The anecdote lingering in the Mermaid Tavern is cocoon-stuff, and left for waste; time spiritualizes the soul it released in Shakespeare, and the speedier the change, so much the purer is the warrant of a life above death in the minds of men. The loneliness of antique names is the austerity of fame, and only therewith do Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, seem nobly clad and among equals; the nude figure of Shelley at Oxford is symbolical and prophetic of this disencumberment of mortality, the freed soul of the poet,--like Bion, a divine form. Not to speak of those greatest works, the Prayer Book, the Bible, which seem so impersonal in origin as to be the creation of the English tongue itself and the genius of language adoring God; nor of Hakluyt or Clarendon, whose books are all men's actions; how little do the most isolated and seclusive authors, Surrey, Collins, Keats, perpetuate except the pure poet! In these hundred famous books there are few valued for aught more than they contain in themselves, or which require any other light to read them by than what they bring with them; they are rather hampered than helped by the recollection of their authors' careers. Sidney adds lustre to the Arcadia; an exception among men, in this as in all other ways, by virtue of that something supereminent in him which dazzled his own age. But who else of famous authors is greater in his life than in his book? It is the book that gives significance to the man, not the man to the book. These authors would gain by oblivion of themselves, and that in proportion to their greatness, thereby being at once removed into the impersonal region of man's permanent spirit and of art. The exceptions are only seemingly such; it is Johnson's thought and the style of a great mind that preserve Boswell, not his human grossness; and in Pepys it is the mundane and every-day immortality of human nature, this permanently curious and impertinent world, not his own scandal and peepings, that yield him allowance in libraries. In all