Lawyers as Biographers.

Boswell also has this supreme advantage in the race for immortality, — that he has the race-ground as a preserve, which no one else can traverse, while the field over which Campbell passed can be trodden by other and perhaps surer feet. The third biographer already mentioned, Roger North, belongs to the class of Bos well rather than that of Campbell. His work all depends upon personal observation. Though he was an actor in the scenes which he describes, he had the power of self-efface ment, in the presence of his subject. The fact that his labors are devoted to the lives of his brothers whom he dearly loved suf fuses his biographies with a glow of affec tion that enlists sympathy, while the vigor and charm of his descriptions awaken an intense interest. Though he lived a long time ago, yet the period during which he was on the stage is deeply interesting and in structive, for he describes the lives and con duct of our English ancestors when the American colonists drew their life and per haps education from England, and when their thoughts, aspirations, and weaknesses were thoroughly English. It should be added that the legal training to which these writers (Boswell, North, and Campbell) were subjected, led them clearly to fix in their minds the true limits of a biography. They have kept steadily in view the fact that it was the record of a single life and no more, with its origin, ancestry, education, hopes, trials, vicissitudes, failures, triumphs, and close. A biography may be written so as not to be distinguishable from a history. We may call to mind in our own time the six bulky volumes of Professor Masson, of Edinburgh, on the life and times of John Milton. We ask, as we turn it over, Why call it a " life "? The history of Eng land is before us, with John Milton some times present, and at other times hardly a passive spectator. Boswell and North, with others of their class, have not made this mis take, and we thank them for it. It is the principal object of this paper to

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bring to notice the merits of Roger North as a writer, and to show the intrinsic value at the present time of his writings. Lord Campbell, in his life of Lord Keeper Guilford, has made much use of Roger North's biography. As the purpose of this paper is, as has been said, to disclose his merit as a writer, and not at all to magnify or vilify Lord Guilford, and as its materials have been wholly derived from original sources, it will be of no consequence that some of the same incidents may be now re ferred to as attracted the attention of Lord Campbell. The Norths were descended from an an cient family. The head of it in the time of Charles II. was Lord North, Baron of Kirtling in Cambridgeshire. The family consisted of six sons and four daughters "who lived to appear in the world, besides some who died in minority." The second, third, and fourth sons were highly distin guished men, the most prominent being Lord Guilford, Keeper of the Great Seal under Kings Charles II. and James II. We are told that in this " numerous and diffused flock there was not one scabby sheep." Our biographer treats most fully of the life of his highly successful brother, Francis North, Lord Guilford. He calls him his "best " brother, not because he was the most virtuous, but because he was the most successful in life, and most able to help his friends, including Roger. It falls in his way, in tracing the career of Lord Guilford, among other things to give his views of the legal education of the day, and to show forth the "art of rising" in his profession. The real inquiry then was, How shall a young man without estates and of a sprightly and merry disposition, fond of society, with "an airy and volatile mind," go forward in the law, for which he had no love? Roger had heard Francis (Lord Guilford) say more than once in his early manhood that if he had been sure of a hundred pounds a year to live on, he had never been a lawyer. But as cir cumstances were, he was convinced that