Biography is the artistic representation in continuous narrative of the life and character of a particular individual. It may be either a mere curriculum vitae, detailing only the historical sequence of the incidents of a man's life, or it may be an elaborate attempt at an analysis of his character, and at a complete reconstruction of the whole motives of his actions. To the former class the ancient examples of biography, as the Lives of Cornelius Nepos, mainly belong, while modern biographers have mostly aimed at the latter method. But of course the inward life is revealed in the outward, and even such a biography as the Agricola of Tacitus, with all its stately dignity and reticence, does give the reader some real insight into the character of the man. The main object of biography as now written is portraiture, and its success or failure mainly depends on the degree of truth and completeness with which the image is represented. The facts of a life may be fully and truthfully told without any adequate idea being given of the personality of the central figure, which is often revealed in small details that might well escape the notice of a biographer who lacked the eye to see them and their significance. Thus, as Dr Johnson points out, Sallust has not forgotten in his account of Catiline to remark that his walk was now quick and again slow, as an indication of a mind revolving with violent commotion. But indeed it could not be better put than it is by Plutarch, the prince of ancient biographers, in his 'Alexander,' in a passage aptly quoted by Boswell: 'Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievement that men's virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges or the most important battles.'
It is hardly necessary to add that there is no more interesting department of literature than biography, that the most fascinating study of mankind has ever been and will ever be man himself, and this hardly less in the lyric or the occasional essay than in the formal biography or autobiography. 'I never look,' says Montaigne, 'upon an author, be they such as write of virtue and of actions, but I curiously endeavour to find out what he was himself.' The genuine lyric is a spontaneous and impassioned expression of an emotion of the writer, and its poetical value depends ultimately on the poverty or richness of his personality; while the essay, as understood by Montaigne, its inventor, and such masters in this form as Addison and Charles Lamb, owes no small part of its charm to the pleasing egotism by which hints as to the feelings and foibles of the writer are conveyed by the way to the sympathetic reader. The essay has now come to be so much a merely didactic medium that the personal equation in it has become inconsiderable, and we are apt to forget that in its simpler and perhaps more perfect forms it ever contained something of self-revelation, conscious or unconscious. Even such severe examples as the famous essays of Bacon, throughout which we scarcely find one word about the writer, yet really make up, as Dr Abbott points out, a kind of autobiography which tells the story of the intellectual and moral history of youth passing into age, and the student making way for the statesman.
Many lives are written in such eulogistic terms that they fail by default to give a truthful picture of their subject, while others, in their fear of being unlike life, deepen the shadows until the picture becomes equally untrue through its over-truthfulness. Thus, in the life of Carlyle by Mr Froude, many critics accused its accomplished author of having given such undue prominence to the disagreements between Carlyle and his wife as to distort completely the picture of the ordinary life of the pair; while Mr Froude's defenders maintained that he had but painted Carlyle as he would have painted himself, every wrinkle on the face truthfully represented on the canvas, and that his business was to describe the man as he lived, not as he should have lived. Again, a biographer may not understand the relative significance of things, and thus unconsciously give an untrue picture of his subject. Especially is this danger close to him when he has to deal with a time or a society in which he himself has not lived. It is difficult for him to breathe freely in another atmosphere than his own, and avoid anachronisms in feeling if not in fact.
A biographer must have an adequate knowledge of his subject and his surroundings. He must follow him in his controversies and his speculations, and must be able to weigh in the balance his abilities as well as his private virtues. Thus the best biography should be that written by one almost as great as his hero, skilled in the same things, with full sympathy and perfect knowledge, as the life of Dr Arnold by Dean Stanley, and Boccaccio's life of Dante—'a great man,' says Emerson, 'to describe a greater;' while the worst should be the production of the professional biographer, who is ready at a moment's notice to write to order lives of poet, philanthropist, or man of science alike. The latter part of the proposition is much truer than the former, which is indeed true, though not exclusively so, for it will hardly be maintained that Boswell was nearly as great a man as his hero, though he had insight enough to write the best biography in the English language; while from a merely literary point of view, some of the most effective biographies we possess were written by men of letters, lacking the special technical knowledge that might have been esteemed necessary. Southey's life of Nelson is admittedly one of the most perfect biographies in existence, yet the author tells us that he had to move among the naval terms like a cat among crockery. Indeed adequate insight and sympathy, with a fine sense for literary form, may make up a complete equipment for a biographer, for Walton's lives are absolutely perfect examples of biography, though the garrulous old angler could scarcely have understood the full significance of the great work of Hooker. There are few books in English of such abiding interest and excellence as Johnson's Lives of the Poets—a singularly happy combination of sympathy and intelligence, although at the same time a collection of lives of very varying values. Thus the lives of Pope and Dryden are as conspicuous for their goodness as those of Gray and Milton are for their badness, in one respect at any rate. That of Savage has the additional interest of casting a reflex light on the early struggles of Johnson himself, while yet he was without his Boswell. No less admirable are Macaulay's short lives of Johnson, Goldsmith, Atterbury, and Bunyan, written for the Encyclopædia Britannica; and Scott's volume of Biographical Memoirs—short, shrewdly sensible lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, Johnson, and others. Scott's lives of Swift and Dryden, forming the first volumes of complete editions of their respective works, still hold the field.
Most modern biographies are too large—they err by not selecting merely the significant. Perhaps it is true that near things look too large, and that the right perspective is only possible to the observer at some distance. The lives of the greatest men must teem with details that are quite ordinary and unimportant, and we gain absolutely nothing by having these set down. Just as in the art of portrait-painting, it is relatively of but little importance how the accessories are filled in, so as the living look that made up the individuality of the subject has been caught. And if it requires a special gift of insight in a Velasquez or a Rembrandt to see so as to reproduce on his canvas the subtle something on which the expression of a face depends, so to the biographer there is the same necessity to see under the surface the hidden springs of character; while it cannot be doubted that his task—the moral diagnosis of motive—is infinitely the greater in difficulty. The biographer must be more than the mere realist who can photograph facts—he must be something of the idealist as well, for he has to create as well as reproduce; and we value a biography exactly in proportion as its author has succeeded in creating for us the character of a new man or woman to be added to our personal acquaintance. If, as has been said, every man's life is worth telling for something that there was in it of unique interest, it may be equally true that all the life save this particular part was not worth telling at all, and had better been left untold. Although undoctored human nature with its swarm of struggling and contending motives is always an interesting study—in its morbid no less than in its normal phases—yet the elaborate dissection of mere human frailty must ever be a wearisome and unprofitable pursuit. Man's spiritual aspirations cannot be fed upon mere clever character-analysis, and lives that had in them nothing high for humanity had better be soon forgotten. There are perhaps no books more really unprofitable to generous youth than those that are often put into their hands—the lives of men who have earned mere material success, and carved themselves fortunes out of the hard conditions in which they were born. Humanity in its onward progress will soon get past this point, and recognise that in the history of our race the real spiritual and ultimately material makers of the future were far more often men who seemed to fail completely in the struggle of life.
The lives of the great men who have helped to mould their times throw much light on contemporary history. The biographies of Cromwell, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon, broadly speaking, sum up great part of the public history of their times, but do no more for us than merely throw a side-light on its social history, which must be reconstructed by a wide and patient study of the conditions of life of the common people. Professor Masson's life of Milton is the largest life of an individual Englishman, but despite its ponderous learning and great accuracy, cannot be regarded as a model biography, overweighted as it is with an enormous mass of detail about contemporaries unjustified by anything but a round-about and indirect connection with Milton himself, who, spite of his poetical and even political importance, was not by any means the centre of the destinies of England. Carlyle's life of John Sterling, again, is an example of an almost perfect biography, and yet it is that of a man whose life was in some respects hardly worth writing at all. He was indeed a man of high aspirations and clear intellect, but beyond this there was scarcely anything very memorable in him, and the abiding charm of the book is due to nothing but the consummate art of the writer and his revelation of himself in sympathy with his subject. Mr Cross's life of George Eliot errs in the opposite direction. Here the biographer adopted the method of making the subject speak entirely by extracts from letters, with the very briefest possible connection of narrative. But by keeping himself so much out of sight, the writer only avoided
Scylla to fall into Charybdis, and succeeded in making a book dull and lifeless that should have been unusually full of interest.
Many biographies, by having a subject of too narrow interest, or by treating a subject in too narrow and special a sense, do not reach the level of a permanent place in literature, though they may have been treated with full knowledge, fine literary sense working within the conditions laid down, and even proper sense of relative proportion. Every year produces examples of biography which are doomed, spite of more or less creditable literary workmanship, to be soon forgotten, from the ephemeral importance to the world of their subjects, and the controversies in which they were involved. Each one, for example, of our hundred religious denominations has its heroes—all important to its own sectaries, but not necessarily of the slightest value to the infinitely wider world. The lives of these men are full of interest within the small circle of their personal influence, but they do not in the least touch the sympathies of readers outside it, unless they chance at once to be written with more than consummate literary skill, and to be revelations of figures with dimensions much beyond those of the usual church leader or pulpit orator. But unfortunately the hero of our religious biographies is not always a Wesley, a Chalmers, an Edward Irving, a Whitefield, or a Pusey, any more than the biographer is always a Southey, a Hanna, a Mrs Oliphant, or a Liddon. Similarly, there is hardly an eminent man of science, actor, musician, mere millionaire, or successful soldier whose life is not written often in his own lifetime, at more or less extravagant length, and with a more or less absurd overestimate of his relative importance. By no means the least really important of our biographies are our lives of 'illustrious shoemakers,' and those unknown village naturalists who so suddenly found themselves famous.
We have many lives, moreover, of very great inherent importance indeed, but which appeal to comparatively small circles of readers from the large demand they make upon the possession of special culture or knowledge. Such are many of our larger lives of philosophers, and those of artists and musicians. Excellent examples of the last are Crowe and Cavalcaselle's lives of Raphael and Titta's Bach, Jahn's Mozart, Karasowski's Chopin, and Woltmann's Hans Holbein, all excellent examples of solid, conscientious, and exhaustive biography, but of too large proportions for the mere literary student.
All history is full of the materials of biography, though it is only in the narrowest sense true that history is nothing but an aggregation of the biographies of individuals. No little of the interest in ancient and modern histories alike depends on the pictures of men and women with which their pages are lightened up, and this we find in annalists like Livy and Tacitus, no less than in professed biographers like Plutarch and Suetonius. Perhaps no more living portraits were ever painted than those sketched in a few touches in the lurid colours of Tacitus. In the hastiest sketch of the master we see far more than in the most finished painting by the dauber. Such books as Holinshed's Chronicle, Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, Burnet's History of his Own Time, and Shakespeare's historical plays, from the portraits of individuals they contain, have an additional interest that is only second to their historical importance. Indeed it is far more than a paradox to say that such works of creative fiction as the last are truer than the records of history themselves, for they are informed with a deeper inwardness than these, and do far more to create for us the actual living objective figures of history. Shakespeare's
Richard III. is not only a magnificent creation as the dramatic revelation of a matchless usurper, but it is so true a realisation of this working on a sound basis of consistent tradition that it satisfies, as Mr Gairdner tells us, the requirements of historical truth almost as much as any formal history. Shakespeare's historical figures are not puppets dressed in old clothes, but living and breathing men and women, and the bare historical details of their characters and lives have become fused in his glowing imagination and harmonised into consistent wholes stamped with the warm and actual impress of very truth. This is hardly less true of Macaulay's History, and still more of Carlyle's French Revolution, with its vivid portraits of even the minor figures flashed like instantaneous photographs upon the reader's brain. Again, books like D'Israeli's Calamities of Authors and Quarrels of Authors are full of rich material for the biographer, as are also such critical essays as those of Macaulay and Carlyle, hardly less than professedly biographic studies like Hayward's Sketches of Eminent Statesmen and Writers, and Bagehot's Biographical Studies.
One word must be said on the question of the biographer's reticence. Voltaire said, 'We owe consideration to the living; to the dead we owe only truth.' Doubtless this is true if the dead have slumbered long enough to be regarded somewhat impersonally even by their own descendants, but no language is too strong to reprobate the conduct of those writers of biography or autobiography who ruthlessly tear open unhealed wounds and bridge their malignant malice across the separating grave. The concluding and posthumous volume of Campbell's lives of the Chancellors, containing the lives of Brougham and Lyndhurst, is an example of biography, whether due to deliberate malice or no, so full of misrepresentation and inaccuracy, to say nothing of lack of generosity and good taste in treating the life of great living contemporaries, that, as Sir Charles Wetherell wittily said, or at least said, the author had 'added a new sting to death.'
No form of this composition is of more abiding interest than the autobiography in which a man narrates his own history, unlocks his heart, and takes the public into confidence by laying bare the motives of his life. To know one's self was the first and last step to wisdom, according to the Greek sage—the last, indeed, for nothing is more difficult to attain than just such self-knowledge. And if a man has so much ado to understand his own heart, how much less valuable will be his diagnosis of his neighbour's. Dr Johnson thought every man's life could be best written by himself, and doubtless so it could if every man were a Dr Johnson. It is needless to say that nothing can be more difficult than to preserve the just balance between due modesty and overweening self-consciousness and self-esteem. In this form there are no better examples in the English tongue than those of Gibbon and Hume, and the opening sentence of the latter is memorable as a canon of art: 'It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity, therefore I shall be short.' It would be invidious to name modern autobiographies which reveal a complete overestimate of the writer's own abilities or importance, though our contemporary literature is by no means barren of such books, often naïve and unconscious to a degree. Autobiographies of more than ordinary interest and value are those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Sir Kenelm Digby, Jerome Cardan, Ellwood, Clarendon, 'Jupiter' Carlyle, Thomas Boston, Franklin, Haydon, Talleyrand, O. W. Holmes, Harriet Martineau, Beranger, Miss Mitford, Mary Somerville, Hugh Miller ('My Schools and Schoolmasters'), Meadows Taylor, H. C. Andersen, Scott ('Journal'),
Leigh Hunt, Berlioz, Macready, John Stuart Mill, George Sand, Mark Pattison, Anthony Trollope, Renan in Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse, Alphonse Daudet in Trente Ans de Paris, Sir Henry Taylor, John Ruskin in Proterita, and the fragment in Carlyle's Reminiscences, with its strange sad story of self-reproach lightened up with rare literary charm and gleams of tenderness that make it unique in English literature.
St Augustine's Confessions stands by itself as a revelation of the spiritual history of perhaps the greatest intellect that has ever been entirely mastered and moulded by religion. Completely different in most respects, but hardly less valuable as a confession of the strange spiritual history of a mighty intellect and a great heart, is the Apologia of Cardinal Newman. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici has high value as a confession of faith, but not a little of its exceptional literary charm depends upon the pleasing egotism with which its author reveals his foibles to the reader. The Grace Abounding of Bunyan is a spiritual autobiography of singular intensity, in spite of itself of high value as literature. Rousseau's Confessions is a book of rare interest, but hardly of such precious value as its author imagined, for the ear of the modern reader never fails to detect the ring of the counterfeit that deprives it of half its charm by robbing it of reality. Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit stands quite alone as the self-told history of the artistic growth of perhaps the best-cultured intellect that the world has ever seen; but its value would be greater if, to use the author's own antithesis, we knew quite how much is truth and how much is poetry. Borrow's Lavengro is a book difficult to class, but is substantially an autobiography at least; and the same is equally true of De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, one of the strangest books in our language. Some of our greatest novels contain autobiography wrapped up more or less obscurely in them, and to the consequent reality may owe no little of their power. We know that the story of David Copperfield closely follows the early life of Dickens, and that George Eliot herself was just such a girl as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. There are other books about which it is doubtful how far they are fact and how far fiction, as the Memoirs of Captain Carleton and of Bampfylde Moore Carew. Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier is exactly such a book as might well have been true, and the great Chatham did no wrong to his intelligence in accepting it as actual history.
The letters of Cicero, Madame de Sevigné, Pope, Gray, Cowper, and such masters in this form, teem with invaluable autobiographical details; and indeed most modern biographies are largely made up of the letters of the subject, and thus are to a great extent autobiographic in character; while many of the larger and more important of recent biographies, as those of General Grant by his family, and Charles Darwin by his son, contain an autobiographical portion, and so belong to both divisions at once. Of Shakespeare, our greatest Englishman, there is no adequate life, and it is hardly probable that such ever will be written; of Thackeray, again, we have no life, in accordance with his own desire, though such publications as Anthony Trollope's study in the 'English Men of Letters' series, and still more the collection of his own letters published in 1887, go some way at least to supply the want. Some of the best English biographies have been already named; others are Lockhart's Scott; Moore's Bipon; Morley's Diderot and Rousseau; Trevelyan's Macaulay and Fox; Sir Theodore Martin's Life of the Prince Consort; Carlyle's Frederick the Great, his Schiller, and his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell; Stopford Brooke's Robertson of Brighton; Chalmers, by
Hanna; Coxe's Marlborough; Lewes's Goethe; Talfourd's Lamb; Mrs Gilchrist's Blake; Mrs Gaskell's Charlotte Brontë; Washington Irving's Columbus; Sparks's Washington; Hayley's Cowper; M'Crie's Knox and Andrew Melville; Lytton's life; Spedding's Bacon, an elaborate and not unsuccessful attempt to rehabilitate a hero; Hamerton's Turner; Mark Pattison's Casaubon; Helps's Cortez, and his Pizarro; Froude's Erasmus; Forster's Goldsmith, Landon, and Dickens; Maurice, by his son; Longfellow, by his brother; Seeley's Stein; Dowden's Shelley; Cabot's Emerson; J. Dykes Campbell's Coleridge; and Lord Wolseley's Marlborough. Some of the more remarkable shorter biographies in English literature are Adamnan's Life of St Columba, More's Henry VII., Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, Mrs Hutchinson's Memoirs of her husband, and Crubb's Life, by his son.
Examples of scoundrelism frankly owned, as in Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, are Casanova's Memoirs and the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; while examples of biographies in which the author abuses his hero, in contrast to biography as usually written, are Sir Walter Scott's and Lanfrey's lives of Napoleon, R. W. Griswold's Poe, and O'Connor's Beaconsfield. A remarkable example of a biography in which the reader finds almost no interest whatever save in the personality of the writer, is the life of Lord George Bentinck, by Disraeli, afterwards Lord Beaconsfield.
One other class of writings often contains miniature biographies, and at least are invaluable as materials for the biographer no less than the historian, the Memoires pour servir, in which French literature is so rich. Such books as Pepys' and Evelyn's Diaries are invaluable bits of autobiography, while they are more. Grammont's Memoirs cannot be overlooked by any one who wishes to understand the men and women of the Restoration; while Crabb Robinson's voluminous diaries and Senior's reports of conversations contain invaluable materials, which will give colour to biographies of nineteenth-century men and women yet unwritten, as well as add no less valuable qualifying clauses to the estimates of persons set forth in lives already in our hands. Greville's Diaries will ever be of great importance for the Victorian era, covering as they do a period of over forty years, and containing, with many stories and no little scandal, a few elaborate portraits.
In the French and German languages there are many excellent examples of biography. Here it may be enough to mention the names of the authors of what are among the most valuable: In France, Fléchier, Fontenelle, Voltaire, Boissy d'Anglas, Villemain, Cousin; and in Germany, Schröckh, Herder, Klein, Meissner, Heeren, Luden, Varnhagen von Ense, Barthold, Döring, Pertz, Haym, Arneth, Otto Jahn, Chrysander, Kapp, and Droysen. Dilthey's Schleiermacher, Haym's Hegel, and Nippold's Rothe may also be named. Some excellent biographies that have been translated into English are Köstlin's Luther, Zeller's Strauss, Loménie's Bcaumarchais, Duntzer's Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing.
Among biographical works, some are universal, as Michaud's Biographie Universelle (1811-28; new ed. 45 vols. 1842-65); the English Cyclopædia, biographical section (1856-57); Nouvelle Biographie Générale (46 vols. 1857-66); among older books, Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697); Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary (32 vols.; new ed. 1812-17); and for our own contemporaries: Vapereau's Dictionnaire Universel des Contemporains (6th ed. 1892); the Dizionario Biografico of Gubernatis (1880); Men of the Time (13th ed. 1891); and Celebrities of the Century (1887). Of certain classes only are Vasari's Lives of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects; Mrs Jameson's Memoirs of Early Italian Painters; Cunningham's Lives of the most Eminent British Painters;
Doran's Their Majesties' Servants; Bettany's Eminent Doctors; Lord Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors, and Lives of the Chief-justices; Dean Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury; Dr Smith and Dr Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography; Agnes Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England, of the Tudor Princesses, and of the Last Four Princesses of the House of Stuart; the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists; Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1781); Smiles's Lives of the Engineers, and his Industrial Biographies; Grove's Dictionary of Musicians (1879-85); and H. A. Müller's Biographisches Künstler-lexicon der Gegenwart (1882). Others again are for certain countries only, as Fuller's Worthies of England (1662); Biographia Britannica (1747; new ed., unfinished by Kippis, q.v., in 1778-93); Chambers's Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen (1835); Sparks's American Biography (1834), and Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography, edited by J. Grant Wilson and John Fiske (6 vols. 1887-88); and our own Dictionary of National Biography, which commenced in 1885, and designed to extend to 50 vols., was first edited by Mr Leslie Stephen (26 vols. 1885-91), and afterwards by Mr Sidney Lee. There are special biographical collections also for Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden, &c.
Special groups of books that are at once biographies and critical studies are the 'English Men of Letters' series and 'Les Grands Ecrivains Français.' In the former, such perfect pieces of work as Leslie Stephen's Johnson, Dean Church's Spenser, Mark Pattison's Milton, John Morley's Burke, Canon Ainger's Lamb, and Sidney Colvin's Keats were permanent gains to English literature; while the latter series opened well with Jules Simon's Cousin, Albert Sorel's Montesquieu, Gaston Boissier's Madame De Sévigné, and E. Caro's George Sand. The 'American Men of Letters' series contains good studies on Hawthorne by J. R. Lowell, Washington Irving by C. D. Warner, and Emerson by O. W. Holmes; the 'American Statesmen,' lives of Jefferson by John F. Morse, and Adams by James T. Hosmer. A similar series is that of the 'English Worthies,' edited by Mr Andrew Lang, containing books so good as Darwin by Grant Allen, Marlborough by Mr Saintsbury, Raleigh by Mr Gosse, and Steele by Austin Dobson. Other series depending largely on the biographical interest are 'The Great Musicians,' among them Weber by Sir Julius Benedict, and Wagner by Mr Hueffer; the 'Great Artists,' with Dürer and Titian by Heath, Hogarth by Dobson, Turner by Monkhouse, and Velasquez by Stowe; the 'Eminent Women' series, with Maria Edgeworth by Helen Zimmern, Mary Lamb by Annie Gilchrist, and the Countess of Albany by Vernon Lee; 'English Philosophers,' with Bacon by Fowler, and J. S. Mill by Helen Taylor; and the 'New Plutarch,' with Coligny by Walter Besant, Franklin by Beesly, Victor Emmanuel by Dicey, Abraham Lincoln by Leland, and Haroun Alraschid by Palmer. Somewhat similar, and indeed the earliest of such series as these, are 'Ancient Classics for English Readers,' including literary studies with a biographical setting of Horace, Cicero, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, &c.; and 'Foreign Classics for English Readers,' including similar books devoted to Rabelais, Voltaire, Goethe, Pascal, Diderot, &c. The 'Philosophical Classics' include monographs so masterly as Hegel by Edward Caird, Berkeley by Professor Fraser, and Vico by Professor Flint. The 'Twelve English Statesmen' included Freeman's William the Conqueror and Lord Rosebery's Pitt. Other series are 'Leaders of Religion,' 'Rulers of India,' 'Heroes of the Nations,' 'The Queen's Prime Ministers,' and 'Contemporary Writers.' See LETTERS.