But is it not after the discreditable particulars which excite a correspondingly discreditable curiosity that we are eager, and these that we read with greatest zest? So it should seem if we judged by the fact that biography, and especially that of men of letters, tends more and more towards these indecent exposures. The concern of the biographer should be with the mind, and not with the body of his victim. We are willing to be taken into the parlor and the library, but may fairly refuse to be dragged down to the kitchen or to look into the pantry. Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” does not come under this condemnation, being mainly a record of the great doctor’s opinions, and, since done with his own consent, is almost to be called autobiographical. There are certain memoirs after reading which one blushes as if he had not only been peeping through a key-hole, but had been caught in the act. No doubt there is a fearful truth in Shakespeare’s saying,-- “The evil that men do lives after them,” but I should limit it to the evil done by otherwise good men, for it is only in this kind of evil that others will seek excuse for what they are tempted to do, or palliation for what they have already done. I like to believe, and to think I see reason for believing, that it is the good that is in men which is immortal, and beneficently immortal, and that the sooner the perishable husk in which it was enveloped is suffered to perish and crumble away, the sooner we shall know them as they really were. I remember how Longfellow used to laugh in his kindly way when he told the story of the French visitor who asked him for some _révélations intimes_ of his domestic life, to be published in a Paris newspaper. No man would have lost less by the most staring light that could have been admitted to those sacred retreats, but he shrank instinctively from being an accomplice to its admission. I am not sure that I ought to be grateful for the probable identification of the Dark Lady to whom twenty-five of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed, much as I should commend the research and acuteness that rendered it possible. We had, indeed, more than suspected that these sonnets had an address within the bills of mortality, for no such red-blooded flame as this sometimes is ever burned on the altar of the Ideal. But whoever she was, she was unembodied so long as she was nameless, she moved about in a world not realized, sacred in her inaccessibility, a fainter image of that image of her which had been mirrored in the poet’s eyes; and this vulgarization of her into flesh and blood seems to pull down the sonnets from heaven’s sweetest air to the turbid level of our earthier apprehension. Here is no longer an object for the upward, but for the furtive and sidelong glance. A gentleman once told me that being compelled to part with some family portraits, he requested a dealer to price that of a collateral ancestress by Gainsborough. He thought the sum offered surprisingly