of to-day moves gives to surrounding objects and relations a certain distortion. The distortion becomes natural to him, and he wonders why others do not accept him as unquestioningly as formerly, why they adopt a critical attitude with a tendency to open opposition. If he is pushed out from a public career, and gains time for reflection and self-examination, the injustice and unreason of his former constituency appear large and to him are based upon misconception. So he enters upon his defense, and tells the old story in the old way, with distorted vision and with vanished glamour. It requires a greatness of character to stand the test, and there are few great characters. The majority babble, retail half-truths and vamp the worn and patched shreds until they have encased themselves in nothing but their own too transparent self-consciousness, still not undisturbed by doubts. Seeking to invest themselves with a cloudlike splendor and halo as the reward for upright conduct, they retire into the smoke-shield of their own creation, to emerge streaked with smudge. As a mode of defense autobiography is a failure; it too often confirms the old saying, that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client. The ghastly skull of St. Charles Borromeo looked out from its gorgeous trappings and surroundings, always a reminder of what he had been—a mortal. As ghastly figures stare from the written pages of autobiography, reminders that the mortal or weak parts dominated the whole, and left a record that is unchangeable.
To the biographer, not too closely related to his subject, and to the editor, belongs the task of telling the truth—not the simple or the whole truth, but as much as the records will afford. The writer of biography has the wider field, the better opportunity, for he may wander far and invoke the dramatic and the picturesque, even infusing into the relation a color of his own. His story may read like a romance, it may be a fairy tale, or it may be a verbal cenotaph wherein nothing of its subject may be found; it soon is weighed, judged, and ticketed for remembrance or oblivion.
An editor is restricted to the written record; the memories of oldest inhabitants and the tradition of generations have no attraction for him. His purpose is to give all that may be of service to our host of anxious inquirers and the ever-increasing number of writers of history, and to give it unvarnished, as the documents contain it. This is not to say that he will be unsympathetic. I defy anyone to live among the records of the past without absorbing some spirit kindred to that which actuated the men of that time. He sees through their eyes, and re-enacts their deeds, with a wider
