Essays on the Novel Author:Adolphus Alfred Jack Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I SCOTT In this age of biography, when no sooner is a man of any eminence dead, than his family, his relatives, or his friends clamour for the story ... more »of his life, it is common to hear biographers complaining of the dearth of material. Of those complaints, the loudest and most just come from the biographers of literary men. In most instances their self-imposed task is a hard one. Every year, from different points of the compass, a certain number of youths go to London, and, once arrived there, spend existences of average duration in writing, as the case may be, a small or a great number of books. About the lives of such people there is a sameness which it Lis impossible for the biographer to get over. In the life of the ordinary literary man, there are, speaking generally, no events,no excitements greater than those produced by the reviews of meritorious books, and no periods of great enthusiasm. The ordinary literary man not only lives the ordinary life of the educated classes, but his whole being is in touch with them. He is one of a hundred thousand or two who share his feelings, and, from the accident that he spends his time in writing better than his neighbours, one of a thousand similarly occupied. With the great authors there is this difference, that though the path laid down for them is, in most cases, that of the ordinary literary man, they are so distinguished from their fellows, they have so much of the fire that quickens, so eager an interest in what passes through the mind, that it seldom happens that their life is ordinary. Let the circumstances in which they are placed be as colourless as they may, something of their own vitality will somewhere give it colour. Even if the life is such as Wordsworth's, that of the typical student or recluse, the greater ...« less