It is not only more instructive--it is more enlivening. The conventionalities of criticism (moral, not literary, criticism) pass from mouth to mouth, and from pen to pen, until the iterations of the press are crystallized in encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries. And from such verdicts there is no appeal. Their laboured impartiality, their systematic adjustments, their careful avoidance of intuition, produce in the public mind a level sameness of misunderstanding. Many sensible people think this a good result. Even a man who did his own thinking, and maintained his own intellectual free-hold, like Mr. Bagehot, knew and upheld the value of ruts. He was well aware how far a little intelligence can be made to go, unless it aspires to originality. Therefore he grumbled at the paradoxes which were somewhat of a novelty in his day, but which are out-worn in ours, at the making over of virtue into vice, and of vice into something more inspiriting than virtue. “We have palliations of Tiberius, eulogies on Henry the Eighth, devotional exercises to Cromwell, and fulsome adulations of the first Napoleon.” That was a half-century ago. To-day, Tiberius is not so much out of favour as out of mind; Mr. Froude was the last man really interested in the moral status of Henry the Eighth; Mr. Wells has given us his word for it that Napoleon was a very ordinary person; and the English people have erected a statue of Cromwell close to the Houses of Parliament, by way of reminding him (in his appointed place) of the survival of representative government. The twentieth century does not lean to extravagant partialities. Its trend is to disparagement, to searchlights, to that lavish and ironic candour which no man’s reputation can survive. When Mr. Lytton Strachey reversed Mr. Stevenson’s suggestion, and chose, as subject-matter of a book, four people of whom the world had heard little but good, who had been praised and reverenced beyond their deserts, but for whom he cherished a secret and cold hostility, he experimented successfully with the latent uncharitableness of men’s minds. The brilliancy with which the four essays were written, the keenness of each assault, the charm and persuasiveness of the style, delighted even the uncensorious. The business of a biographer, said the author in a very engaging preface, is to maintain his own freedom of spirit, and lay bare events as he understands them, “dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions.”