~Biography.~--As in the case of painters, who have undertaken to give us a
beautiful and graceful figure, which may have some slight blemishes, we
do not wish them to pass over such blemishes altogether, nor yet to mark
them too prominently. The one would spoil the beauty, and the other
destroy the likeness of the picture.--_Plutarch._
Biographies of great, but especially of good men, are most instructive
and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best
are almost equivalent to gospels--teaching high living, high thinking,
and energetic action for their own and the world's good.--_Samuel
Smiles._
It is rarely well executed. They only who live with a man can write his
life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people, who
have lived with a man, know what to remark about him.--_Johnson._
History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives
can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day
less, and in a short time is lost forever.--_Johnson._
Occasionally a single anecdote opens a character; biography has its
comparative anatomy, and a saying or a sentiment enables the skillful
hand to construct the skeleton.--_Willmott._
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is
to continue in a state of childhood all our days.--_Plutarch._
~Birth.~--Noble in appearance, but this is mere outside; many noble born
are base.--_Euripides._
~Blessings.~--The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come
to us with a mixture; like a schoolboy's holiday, with a task affixed to
the tail of it.--_Charles Lamb._
Blessedness consists in the accomplishment of our desires, and in our
having only regular desires.--_St. Augustine._
We mistake the gratuitous blessings of Heaven for the fruits of our own
industry.--_L'Estrange._
Health, beauty, vigor, riches, and all the other things called goods,
operate equally as evils to the vicious and unjust as they do as
benefits to the just.--_Plato._