anyone, gain by the sacrifice?  Of course one would like to write a great biography, but the biographies that live are the lives of men written by friends and contemporaries, living portraits, like Boswell’s Johnson or Stanley’s Arnold.  To write such a book, one needs to have been in constant intercourse with a great personality, to have seen him in success and failure, in happiness and depression, in health and sickness, in strength and weakness.  Such an opportunity is given to few.

Of course, if one has a power of wide and accurate historical survey, a trustworthy memory, a power of vitalising the past, one may well give one’s life to producing a wise and judicious historical work.  But here a man must learn his limitations, and one can only deal successfully with congenial knowledge.  I have myself a very erratic and unbusinesslike mind.  There are certain things, like picturesque personal traits, landscape, small details of life and temperament, that lodge themselves firmly in my mind; but when I am dealing with historical facts and erudite matters, though I can get up my case and present it for the time being with a certain cogency, the knowledge all melts in my mind; and no one ought to think of attempting historical work unless his mind is of the kind that can hold an immense amount of knowledge in solution.  I have a friend, for instance, who can put all kinds of details into his mind—­he has an insatiable appetite for them—­and produce them again years afterwards as sharp and definite in outline as when he put them away.  His mind is, in fact, a great spacious and roomy warehouse, where things are kept dry and in excellent order.  But with myself it is quite different.  To store knowledge of an uncongenial kind in my own mind is just as though I put away a heap of snowballs.  In a day or two their outline is blurred and blunted; in a few months they have melted away and run down the gutters.  So much for historical work.

Then there comes the question of editorial work:  and here again I have the greatest admiration for men like Dr. Birkbeck Hill or Professor Masson, who will devote a lifetime to patiently amassing all the facts that can be gleaned about some great personality.  But this again requires a mind of a certain order, and there is no greater mistake in literary work than to misjudge the quality and force of one’s mind.

My own work, I am certain, must be of a literary kind; and when one goes a little further back and asks oneself what it is that makes great personalities, like Milton or Dr. Johnson, worth spending all this labour about, why one cares to know about their changes of lodgings and their petty disbursements, it is, after all, because they are great personalities, and have displayed their greatness in imaginative writings or in uttering fertile and inspiring conversational dicta.  Imagine what one’s responsibility would have been if one could have persuaded Charles Lamb to have taken up the task