When we read the true autobiography, as that of Benvenuto Cellini, we see the august men of the period assume a secondary place, a shadowy significance. They patronize the artist or imprison him, according to their bent. They give him purses of five hundred ducats when they are complacent, and they banish him from their very limited domains when he kills somebody whom they prefer to keep alive. But not for one moment is our attention distracted from the narrator himself to these rude arbiters of fate. He makes it plain to us from the start that he is penning his autobiography in a spirit of composed enjoyment, and because he deems it “incumbent upon upright men who have performed anything noble or praiseworthy to record with their own hand the events of their lives.” He tells us in detail how it pleased God that he should come into the world; and he tells us of all that he has done to make God’s action in the matter a source of regret, as well as of satisfaction, to others. Those true words of Frederick the Great, “On peut apprendre de bonnes choses d’un scélérat,” are singularly applicable to this particular rascal. It is as difficult to find standards by which to appraise his worth as it is to find rules by which to test his accuracy. Just as it has been said of Rousseau, that even in the very ecstasy of truth-telling he does not tell the truth, so it may be said of Cellini, that even in the very ecstasy of lying he does not wholly lie. It is characteristic of a simpler age than the one we live in now that autobiographers sang their own praises candidly and lustily. Cellini puts graceful eulogies of himself into the mouths of his contemporaries, which is one way, and a very good way, of getting them said. The Duchesse de Montpensier (La Grande Mademoiselle) goes a step further, and assures us that the Creator is sympathetically aware of her merits and importance. “I may say without vanity that just Heaven would not bestow such a woman as I am upon a man who was unworthy of her.” Wilhelmina, Margravine of Baireuth, and sister of Frederick the Great, writes with composure: “Happily my good disposition was stronger than the bad example of my governess”; and, as the testimony of the governess was not taken, Wilhelmina’s carries the day. This directness contrasts pleasantly with the more involved, and possibly more judicious, methods employed by memoir-writers like Richard Lovell Edgeworth, father of the immortal Maria, and by autobiographers like Harriet Martineau. Mr. Edgeworth, recounting his first experience of married life, says with conscious nobility: “I felt the inconvenience of an early and hasty marriage; and though I heartily repented of my folly, I determined to bear with fortitude and temper the evil I had brought upon myself.”