INTRODUCTION.

"IT would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life." Benjamin Franklin sets these words in the forefront of his autobiography, and they deserve to be set in the forefront of all successful works of the kind. A man may think to apply a record of his own life to various purposes. He may fashion it as a text-book of conduct for his children, as a history of his relations with the politics, religion, or literature of his time, as a generous panegyric of his friends, or as an illnatured denunciation of those who have shared his life's successes or defeats. But from whatever point of view the successful autobiographer approaches his subject, unconsciously the same spirit moves him. He is convinced not merely that his life has been worth living, but that he has lived it to eminent advantage. He is self-centred; he is self-satisfied; he loves himself better than his

neighbour; he weighs others in the balance, and finds them wanting; he knows himself to be of full weight. All professions to the contrary may safely be ignored. Absolute truthfulness is the last thing we expect of the successful autobiographer. No man can give an impartial estimate of himself; failure is only courted by attempting it, and success in autobiography is not attainable unless this condition receive practical recognition. But although "vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like," are the salt of autobiography, sincerity of a kind we do require of it. The writer must be true to his own self-conceit. He must have no self-conscious misgivings about his own real value. The austere may condemn his attitude with what warmth they will. The man of human sympathies will give vanity fair quarter wherever he meet it, and no better reward for his forbearcan be promised him than the power of rightly appreciating that small circle of literature in which Lord Herbert's autobiography holds a central place.

The rigid moralist should devote himself to the "poor shrunken things" of autobiography where the true autobiographical spirit is held in check, or whence it is altogether excluded. Let him not at any rate sit in judgment on the vainglorious performance of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Mr.

Swinburne has claimed for this autobiography a place among the hundred best books of the world. On no other work of its class has the critic conferred similar rank. Questions of literary precedence can never hope for final answers, and there may be points of view from which this judgment is disputable. But it is doubtful if any other autobiography breathes quite as freely the writer's overweening conceit of his own worth, which is the primary condition of all autobiographical excellence. At every turn Lord Herbert applauds his own valour, his own beauty, his own gentility of birth. At home and abroad he flatters himself that he is the cynosure of neighbouring eyes. He, in fact, conforms from end to end to all the conditions which make autobiography successful. He is guilty of many misrepresentations. No defect is more patent in his memoirs than the total lack of a sense of proportion. Herbert's self-satisfaction is built on sand. It is bred of the trivialities of fashionable life,-of the butterfly triumphs won in court society. He passes by in contemptuous silence his truly valuable contributions to philosophy, history, and poetry. But the contrast between the grounds on which he professed a desire to be remembered and those on which he deserved to be remembered by posterity, gives his book almost all its value. Men of solid mental ability and achievements occasionally like to pose in society as gay Lotharios; it is rare,

Lord

however, for them to endeavour, even as autobiographers, to convey the impression to all succeeding generations that they were gay Lotharios and not much else besides. Yet it is such transparent errors of judgment that give autobiography its finest flavour.

Lord Herbert professes "to relate to his posterity those passages of his life which he conceives may best declare him and be most useful to them." He asserts that he writes "with all truth and sincerity, as scorning to deceive or speak false to any." When he took the work in hand he was more than sixty years old, and it was therefore fitting (he argued) that he should review his life so as to reform what was amiss and comfort himself with those actions "done according to the rules of conscience, virtue, and honour." No worthier object could he have proposed to himself in his declining years; yet so easily are autobiographers diverted from their avowed purposes, that with the exception of the notices of his very early life and a digression on education, there is no passage in the book which could serve any useful end in the hands of the "young person." There is nothing very interesting in the record of Lord Herbert's youth.1

1 Enthusiastic admirer of the book as was Horace Walpole, he told Mason that he had better skip the first fifty pages, and Montagu that the first forty pages would make him