In the first place, the chief merit of autobiography is to be found in veracity and sincerity; these qualities are more important than style or grammar. One of the most illuminating autobiographies of recent years is _The Letters of Olive Schreiner_; they are as devoid of style and as disdainful of grammar as an apache is of culture. Biography on the other hand must display literary qualities which are not indispensable in autobiography, provided truth is absolute. Cellini’s _Memoirs_ which, in its original edition, showed the lack of literary culture of its author, is nevertheless one of the greatest books of its kind. It is not only the story of a man, it is the history of his time. Such a man and such times! If the style of the writing had been perfected by its admirable translator, it would have lost much of its charm. If the same style had been used by Boswell in his _Life of Samuel Johnson_, no amount of veracity and of sincerity would have redeemed it. We think of biographers as “littérateurs,” but there has never been a great biographer who was not a great artist. Autobiographers have something to say or to give to the world in the manner they know best. The biographer must be objective; he must be able to perceive quickly, to understand readily, to grasp, gather and evaluate facts, to fuse his material into a homogeneous mass, to stamp it with style, and mix with his literary qualities a certain amount of hero-worship. Self-consciousness has no place in his work; he may efface himself as much as he wishes, and recent biographies have proved that the more he does it, the greater his achievement. To use a well-known and often told legend, the biographer may be compared to the swan which Ariosto believed to be gliding on the surface of the river Lethe--the river for which Byron sighed and to which he called in one of his poems. Ariosto’s theory was that when man comes to the end of his life, Death cuts the thread. At the end of that thread is a medal which Time throws in the waters of the Lethe, where it disappears. Occasionally, it falls on a passing swan and nestles between its wings. Gracefully and swiftly the swan carries it to a temple where it is kept for ever. The swan of the allegory is the biographer who, by gathering the deeds and characteristics of his subject, carries them to immortality.