One of the great factors in helping us understand literary works is an acquaintance with some of the episodes of the author's life. Sainte-Beuve revolutionised literary criticism by his dictum that the knowledge of an author's life helps us to follow his work the better. Dr. Johnson once said that he liked the biographical side of literature. Isaac D'Israeli, before Sainte-Beuve, showed in his _Literary Character_ that he grasped the nature of the intimate relationship between an author and his work. It is our contention that a literary work is better appreciated after the facts about an author's life are revealed to us, and this does not usually happen for years after his death. One of the reasons why masterpieces cannot be fully comprehended in an author's lifetime is because we do not know altogether how he came to write the works in question. Shelley and Keats were not fully understood by the critics of their times not only because of their radical views, but because the public did not know the details of the poets' relations with their parents, and the women they loved. How could a cold, stern reviewer find anything in _Epipsychidion_ or _Lamia_ unless he was aware of some facts about Emilia Viviani or Fanny Brawne? How was any fair estimate of either of these poets possible while the information that later times have furnished was not at hand? Many people objected when the letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne were published forty years ago, but these have helped us to understand that the cry that pervades them is the same embodied in music in the _Ode to Fanny_, the _Ode to the Nightingale_ and in _Lamia_. No true estimate of a man is possible till one reads the plaints of his that were not meant for the public. We should not regret the publication of the love letters of the Brownings and Carlyles. Those wonderful letters are almost as good literature as anything the authors wrote for the public. We are enabled to see the writers in an entirely different light from that in which their own works put them, and to understand these better. It was not possible for the age in which Balzac and Goethe lived, fully to appreciate them, for it did not have their published correspondence, and could not estimate the close connection between unknown episodes in their lives and their works. I do not mean that the contemporaries of these poets could not recognise the fact that these men were geniuses, but they could not get a proper understanding of them.