A biography, like a letter, may be said to have two authors, the man written about and the person who writes. Scott certainly gave Lockhart the greatest assistance, both by what he wrote and by what he was. At the beginning the delightful fragment of autobiography, towards the end the profoundly interesting _Journal_, and all through the free, manly, large-hearted letters, were materials of the choicest sort. Scott himself moreover, genial, cordial, of manifold activity, a centre of racy anecdote, was a person whom it was far more easy to set in an attractive frame than any mere literary recluse. Many could have produced a good life of such a man. Lockhart's special praise is that he has written a great one. Except Johnson, there is no English man of letters so well depicted as Scott. Lockhart's taste and style are excellent. The caustic wit which ran riot in the young _Blackwood_ reviewer is restrained by the experience of years and by the necessities of the subject. Lockhart's own part of the narrative is told in grave, temperate English, simple almost to severity, but in a high degree flexible. In the brighter parts there is a pleasant lightness in Lockhart's touch; in the more serious parts he is weighty and powerful; and on occasion, especially towards the end, there is a restrained emotion which proves that part of his wonderful success is due to the fact that his heart was in his work. [Sidenote: Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815-1881).] Arthur Penrhyn Stanley ranks considerably below Lockhart, yet his _Life of Arnold_ (1844) is inferior only to the few unapproachable masterpieces of biography. Stanley was a fluent and able writer in several fields, but in most respects his work is now somewhat discredited. His _Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians_ (1855) has been severely handled for inaccuracy and defective scholarship. His _Lectures on the Eastern Church_ (1861) and _On the Jewish Church_ (1863-1876), and his book of Eastern travel, _Sinai and Palestine_ (1856) are delightful in literary execution, but they are popular rather than solid. Stanley neither was nor, apparently, cared to be exact. He trusted too much to his gift of making things interesting, and had an inadequate conception of the duty he owed to his readers of writing what was true. Other travellers who have followed his footsteps in the East have sometimes found that the scenes he describes, in charming English, are such as are visible only to those whose eyes can penetrate rocks and mountains. This constitutional inaccuracy is a blot upon nearly all his works, and his one permanent contribution to literature will probably prove to be the _Life of Dr. Arnold_. There is here, as Stanley's biographer justly says, 'a glow of repressed enthusiasm which gives to the work one of its greatest charms.' Stanley loved Arnold, and threw himself with unwonted thoroughness into the task of depicting him. For two years, we are told, he abandoned for it