or poem into the abstract regions of speculation. Only so will it be possible to appreciate this man whose name was to have disappeared in 1895, whose work is likely to preserve that name long after oblivion has swallowed the well-intentioned prophets of its extinction. Even so, however carefully I may discuss alike his work and the abstract and technical questions that it raises; however carefully I may gather evidence of his overflowing richness of personality, I shall not be able to make a complete and worthy portrait of the man. There are people, mostly of the generation before my own (though the youngest of us may come to it), who make a practice of suggesting our entire ignorance of a subject by demanding that we shall define it in a few words. "Say what you think of him in a sentence." If I could do that, do you think I should be going to the labour of writing a book? One cannot define in a sentence a man whom it has taken God several millions of years to make. In a dozen chapters it is no less impossible. The utmost one can do, and that only with due humility, is to make an essay in definition. FOOTNOTE: [1] He died in 1852. Wilde wrote in 1888. II BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY "The necessity of complying with times, and of sparing persons, is the great impediment of biography. History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but Lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost for ever. What is known can seldom be immediately told; and when it might be told, it is no longer known. The delicate features of the mind, the nice discriminations of character, and the minute peculiarities of conduct, are soon obliterated; and it is surely better that caprice, obstinacy, frolick, and folly, however they might delight in the description, should be silently forgotten, than that, by wanton merriment and unseasonable detection, a pang should be given to a widow, a daughter, a brother, or a friend. As the process of these narratives is now bringing me among my contemporaries, I begin to feel myself _walking upon ashes under which the fire is not extinguished_, and coming to the time of which it will be proper rather to say _nothing that is false, than all that is true_" (Samuel Johnson, in his "Life of Addison").