8 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Biographers are seldom candid with respect to the faults and 

 failings of their subject. As Lord Jeffrey said in a review of Hardy's 

 Life of Lord Charlemont: "The author's chief fault is that he does 

 not abuse anybody, even when the dignity of history and of virtue calls 

 loudly for such an infliction." 



The eulogistic biographer is consequently responsible for the 

 diffusion of much falsehood respecting historical events. We must 

 remember that, to use the words of J. R. Green, "truth in history 

 as well as truth in science is only part of that great circle of the 

 Truth of God." 



As regards autobiography, of which there is an ever-growing 

 mass, Holmes somewhere remarks that there are only two individuals 

 who can tell the true story of a man's or a woman's life. One is the 

 person concerned and the other is the Recording Angel. The auto- 

 biographer cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, even though he 

 may tell nothing but the truth and the Angel does not allow the record 

 out of his hands. 



The value of oral tradition is constantly growing less and has 

 become in many parts of the world nearly negligible. Still the 

 transmission of historical information by oral repetition persists in a 

 remarkable manner where population is fairly stable and undisturbed. 

 The vicar of Radway, in a recent book about the Edge Hills in Eng- 

 land, refers to three such items told to him "by a man over seventy, 

 who heard them from his grandmother, who lived to be over ninety. 

 She had them from her grandfather, who was a boy when the battle 

 of Edge Hill was fought in the Civil War in 1642." 



Yet it must be remembered that memory is never passive but 

 that its activity is continuous and cannot be controlled. In certain 

 respects it can scarcely be distinguished from the imagination, for 

 which it furnishes materials, which are frequently already remoulded 

 and changed. Never do we remember events exactly and fully in 

 every minute particular. Our present state of mind always, or 

 nearly always, modifies in our recollection what we felt, or what we 

 did, or what we saw in the past. 



Inscriptions still have a certain value as historical material, yet 

 it must be duly checked and discounted, as many of them are liable 

 to the faults of the over-friendly biographer, since they are usually 

 designed to commemorate the importance of an event or the talents 

 and virtues of a deceased individual. The mendacity of an epitaph 

 has become proverbial. The eulogistic inscriptions on the tomb of 

 Anthony Forster in Cumnor church and the wall-tablet in memory of 



