LIFE AND LETTERS OF FARADAY 443 



I will not call the labors of the biographer final. So great 

 a character will challenge reconstruction. In the coming 

 time some sympathetic spirit, with the requisite strength, 

 knowledge, and solvent power, will, I doubt not, render 

 these materials plastic, give them more perfect organic 

 form, and send through them, with less of interruption, 

 the currents of Faraday's life. "He was too good a man," 

 writes his present biographer, "for me to estimate rightly, 

 and too great a philosopher for me to understand thor- 

 oughly." That may be: but the reverent affection to 

 which we owe the discovery, selection, and arrangement 

 of the materials here placed before us is probably a surer 

 guide than mere literary skill. The task of the artist who 

 may wish in future times to reproduce the real though 

 unobtrusive grandeur, the purity, beauty, and childlike 

 simplicity of him whom we have lost, will find his chief 

 treasury already provided for him by Dr. Bence Jones's 

 labor of lovs. 



