PREFACE. I BELIEVE that there are not many persons who read biography with interest, who have not felt a desire for a more intimate personal acquaintance, as it may be called, than is usually afforded them with those men and women whose virtues and vices joined with their natural gifts and acquired accomplishments, made them either illustrious or infamous in their own days, and still influence the world at the distance of centuries after their death. Those works in which the narrative of great public affairs is mixed up with the more minute private and personal details and descriptions, which pedants and philosophers consider to be below what they call "the dignity of history," are, I believe, in spite of learned reprehension, read with more pleasure than the more pretending volumes in which this disagreeable "dignity of history" is stiffly and proudly sustained. When the Roman historian deprecates the censure of those grave and surly readers who, as he anticipates, will charge |