The Charm of A Great Biography

1916

It Leads the Reader Into Quaint and Delightful Byways

Reading biography will furnish you with a peculiar and rare form of entertainment, for besides the subject at hand biography legitimately treats of the foibles, the fashions and the peculiarities of the age with which it deals, says Youth's Companion.

History, although it may have its lighter moments, is essentially sober, but biography, although it is never merely farcical or satirical, may touch vividly open the lighter phases of life and take you, as it were, into quaint and delightful byways, through private parks and into remote and lovely fields.

"Indeed," wrote Boswell in his introduction to his famous biography, "I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man's life than by not only relating the most important events of it in their order, but by interweaving what he privately wrote and said and thought, by which mankind are enabled, as it were, to see him live and to live o'er each scene with him as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life."

Biography, treated in that manner, must inevitably include much that is delightfully diverting. It will give you "the table talk of the great;" it will recount those fascinating little incidents and anecdotes that history so often regards as beneath its notice. It will afford far more than a running account of a life, "beginning with a pedigree and ending with a funeral."