The earliest English biographies date from this time. In the
beginning they were concerned, like Plutarch, with men of action, and
when Sir Fulke Greville wrote a brief account of his friend Sir Philip
Sidney it was the courtier and the soldier, and not the author, that he
designed to celebrate. But soon men of letters came within their scope,
and though the interest in the lives of authors came too late to give us
the contemporary life of Shakespeare we so much long for, it was early
enough to make possible those masterpieces of condensed biography in
which Isaak Walton celebrates Herbert and Donne. Fuller and Aubrey, to
name only two authors, spent lives of laborious industry in hunting down
and chronicling the smallest facts about the worthies of their day and
the time immediately before them. Autobiography followed where biography
led. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well
as less reputable persons, followed the new mode. By the time of the
Restoration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their diaries, and Fox his
journal. Just as in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of personal
feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle and more sincere, in
prose the letter, the journal, and the autobiography formed themselves
to meet the new and growing demand for analysis of the feelings and the
intimate thoughts and sensations of real men and women.
Pages:
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99