30 Mr. Sidney Lee [Jan. 31, 



the direction of national biography. After alluding to mediaeval 

 collections of lives of saints, popes, kings and others, he reviewed 

 the development of biography during the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries, beginning with Leland, Bale, Pits and Foxe. These 

 collective biographers were religious partisans whose theological 

 prejudices had to be counteracted before national biography could 

 enjoy an adequate measure of imj)artiality. Later on, biographers 

 like the Scotsmen Dempster and Mackenzie, betrayed an excessive 

 patriotism or racial bias which overruled all other considerations 

 with equally disastrous results. A great advance was seen 

 during the seventeenth century in Naunton's ' Fragmenta Eegalia,' 

 Holland's ' Heroologia,' Aubrey's ' Lives,' but above all in Wood's 

 ' Athenae Oxonienses ' and Fuller's ' Worthies of England.' In the 

 eighteenth century the encyclopaedic movement gave rise to a genuine 

 attempt at national biography in the work called ' Biographia 

 Britannica.' The first volume appeared in 1747, the seventh and 

 last in 1763. The scheme had grave defects, but they should be 

 treated with the merciful consideration to which the shortcomings 

 of all pioneers are entitled. Moreover, unlike some of its suc- 

 cessors, the ' Biographia Britannica ' achieved the distinction of 

 reaching the letter Z. Eleven years later Dr. Johnson was invited 

 to prepare a second edition. But Dr. Johnson had had one 

 experience in dictionary making and he not unnaturally declined to 

 have a second. The task was undertaken by another (Dr. Kippis), 

 and in 1793 there appeared the fifth and last volume of the second 

 edition of the ' Biographia Britannica.' But though the work had 

 reached its last volume, its final pages had only arrived at the 

 beginning of the letter F. At the article on Sir Thomas Fastolf 

 this undertaking stopped, to remain for ever a magnificent fragment, 

 a melancholy wreck, a fearful example. 



" Checks and disasters 

 Grow in the veins of actions highest reared." 



Some twenty-one years later, Alexander Chalmers completed in 

 thirty-two volumes his very respectable ' Biographical Dictionary.' 

 Some thirty years later, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful 

 Knowledge, under a committee, of which Lord Brougham was chair- 

 man, and Lord Spencer (father of the present earl) was vice-chairman, 

 designed a dictionary of biography which was to combine national 

 with universal biography, on an ambitious scale. But the letter A 

 was only c(mi]3leted in seven volumes, and it is, therefore, not 

 surprising to learn that that venture went no further. A very 

 modest attempt in the same direction followed, in Rose's ' Biographical 

 Dictionary,' but here the first three letters of the aljDhabet absorbed 

 six volumes, and the remaining twenty-three letters were compressed 

 into another six. There followed a pause in the efforts of collective 

 biography in this country. After the middle of the century, Germany 



