'Mirabeau's life and fate teach, to my perception, the most
depressing lesson I have read for years. One would fain have hoped
that so many noble qualities must have made a noble character and
achieved noble ends. No--the mighty genius lived a miserable and
degraded life, and died a dog's death, for want of self-control, for
want of morality, for lack of religion. One's heart is wrung for
Mirabeau after reading his life; and it is not of his greatness we
think, when we close the volume, so much as of his hopeless
recklessness, and of the sufferings, degradation, and untimely end in
which it issued. It appears to me that the biographer errs also in
being too solicitous to present his hero always in a striking point
of view--too negligent of the exact truth. He eulogises him too
much; he subdues all the other characters mentioned and keeps them in
the shade that Mirabeau may stand out more conspicuously. This, no
doubt, is right in art, and admissible in fiction; but in history
(and biography is the history of an individual) it tends to weaken
the force of a narrative by weakening your faith in its accuracy.
TO W. S. WILLIAMS
CHAPTER COFFEE-HOUSE, IVY LANE,
'_July_ 8_th_, 1848.
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