Frazer, Lady. _Leaves from the Golden Bough._ The Macmillan Company. La Fontaine. _Fables._ Schreiner, Olive. _Dreams._ Stephens, James. _Irish Fairy Tales._ The Macmillan Company. Stevenson, Robert Louis. _Fables_, particularly _The Cart Horse and Saddle Horse_ and _The Sinking Ship_. Charles Scribner’s Sons. CHAPTER VII _Biographical Narrative_ It is true that, strictly speaking, all biography is narrative; but it is also true that in much biography the best narrative is lacking. Thus, in calling this chapter Biographical Narrative, we obviously mean the type of biography in which the narrative, or story, element is stressed, in which the character depicted lives in the mind of the reader because he has been drawn as an actor upon his stage, or, in other words, because he himself acts rather than is acted upon by the faithful but none too vigorous pen of his biographer. This kind of biographical narrative requires, first, a subject, who, although not a Dr. Johnson, is at least sufficiently striking in personality and achievement to merit one’s attention and interest, and, second, a sense of perception and discrimination on the part of the biographer. The three selections which are given to illustrate biographical narrative fulfill these requirements. One records the life and work of Dr. Trudeau, the beloved physician of Saranac; another depicts Beau Nash, a “character” of the early eighteenth century; a third portrays the eccentric Lady Hester Stanhope of the Pitt house and the Pitt nose. Even the most cursory reading of the three selections will convince him who reads that the persons portrayed really live, and a careful analysis will show him why and how. It is this analysis which should give him suggestions for his own writing of this kind of narrative. He will easily discover that the last of the models, _The Beloved Physician_, is far longer than either of the others, that it possesses far greater wealth of anecdote and of detail, and that it lays greater stress upon the work of the man than upon the man himself--or, in other words, that it reveals the physician through his relations to his environment rather than through personal traits and habits. And yet when he compares it with _Beau Nash_, which is only one-fourth as long, he will be convinced that the subject of the latter is after all just as clearly portrayed. This debonair gentleman of the early eighteenth century with his snuff-boxes, his white beaver, and his two imperious fingers, lives because of the very choice of detail with which his biographer has drawn him. Bath lives, too, with her welcoming abbey bells and her “periwigged men of fashion, immaculate in all but morals.” Here is no wealth of detail at all, but here instead are a few vivid and concrete facts and objects which paint the picture every whit as clearly.