Santayana, analyzing the essentials of independence, comes to the discouraging conclusion that liberty of speech and liberty to elect our lawmakers do not materially help us to live after our own minds. This he holds to be the only positive and worthwhile form of freedom. He aims high. Very few of us can live after our own minds, because the tyranny of opinion is reënforced by the tyranny of circumstance. But none of us can hope to live after our own minds unless we are free to speak our own minds; to speak them, not only in the company of friends (which is all Mrs. Gerould grants us), but openly in the market-place; and not with a blast of defiance, but calmly as in the exercise of an unquestioned prerogative. Under no other circumstance is it possible to say anything of value or of distinction. Under no other circumstance can we enjoy the luxury of self-respect. There is an occasional affectation of courage and candour on the part of those who know they are striking a popular note; but to dare to be unpopular, “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble word,” is to hold fast to the principles which speeded the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock, and Penn to the shores of the Delaware. The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography Mr. Edmund Gosse, commenting on the lack of literary curiosity in the early years of the seventeenth century, ascribes it to a growing desire for real knowledge, to an increasing seriousness of mind. Men read travels, history, philosophy, theology. “There were interesting people to be met with, but there were no Boswells. Sir Aston Cokayne mentions that he knew all the men of his time, and could have written their lives, had it been worth his while. Instead of doing this, the exasperating creature wrote bad epigrams and dreary tragi-comedies.” A century later, when literary curiosity had in some measure revived, Sir Walter Scott, losing his temper over Richard Cumberland’s “Memoirs,” wrote of their author in the “Quarterly Review”: “He has pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by publishing his own life, and the private history of his acquaintances.” A better illustration of La Fontaine’s wisest fable, “The Miller, his Son, and the Ass,” could not anywhere be found. The only way to please everybody is to have no ass; that is, to print nothing, and leave the world at peace. But as authorship is a trade by which men seek to live, they must in some way get their beast to market, and be criticized accordingly. It is probable that the increasing vogue of biography, the amazing output of books about men and women of meagre attainments and flickering celebrity, sets the modern autobiographer at work. “For now the dentist cannot die, And leave his forceps as of old, But round him, ere his clay be cold, Is spun the vast biography.”