It were difficult to say when the _final_ biography of a man has been produced. Hard, hard is it to decide when anything in this world is final. The never-ending progress of events shapes and readjusts not only the present materials of history, but also by reaction the materials of the past. Much that is supposed to be complete is seen to be unfinished; the done becomes undone, and the peroration of an epoch has to be rewritten for an exordium. This is as true of the individual lives of men as it is of great events. If the ages have to be reconstructed, so also must the men of the ages. If only a mummy now turn over in his porphyry sarcophagus, a papyrus is generally found under him; and the finder, with the papyrus in his hand, may go forth fully warranted to revise every event from the first cataclysm of the Devonian age to the last earthquake in Java, and every man from Moses to Cagliostro. On the whole I incline to the opinion that Professor Sloane has brought the Emperor Napoleon to a kind of final interpretation; I will not say to a full stop, but to something very much resembling a period. In the first place, I offer on the "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte," the eulogium that the work has, in a great degree, _naturalized_ the Corsican as he was never naturalized before--thus bringing him out of cloudland and mere impossible fog to the plain level of human action and purpose. This is much. In accomplishing thus much Professor Sloane has vindicated his claim to be regarded as a great biographer. It has been the bane of nearly all biographical writing that the subjects of it have been completely mythologized. Thus far in the history of mankind biography might be defined as the art of myth-making. I scarcely know what exceptions to cite to this universal vice except only and always Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson." As for American biographies thus far produced, there is scarcely a single example of a work which is not to be classified as a recorded myth. The trouble in all this business has been that the myth-makers, living in a certain atmosphere, have imagined that they are obliged to make their characters conform to the established antecedents of greatness. These established antecedents of greatness have for the most part been created out of superstitions, credulities, blank idealism, and mere dogmatic bosh. No living, active men have ever conformed, or could conform, to the standards which the logicians, the philosophers, and the priests have fixed up for them; and if any of them should conform to such a standard, their place under classification would be with automata, not with living men. Nevertheless, our biographers have been so weak and servile as to make their characters according to this pattern. One character is labelled Washington, another is labelled Franklin, another is labelled Adams, and still another, Lincoln.