DR. JOHNSON, it is said, when he first heard of Boswell's intention to write a life of him, announced, with decision enough, that, if he thought Boswell really meant to write his life, he would prevent it by taking Boswell's! That great authors should actually employ this preventive against bad biographers is a thing we would by no means recommend; but the truth is, that, rich as we are in biography, a wellwritten life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to furnish the record. But great men, like the old Egyptian kings, must all be tried after death, before they can be embalmed: and what, in truth, are these "Sketches," "Anas," "Conversations," "Voices," and the like, but the votes and pleadings of the ill-informed advocates, and jurors, and judges, from whose conflict, however, we shall in the end have a true verdict? The worst of it is at the first; for weak eyes are precisely the fondest of glittering objects. And, accordingly, no sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself; though, many times, this mirror is so twisted with convexities and concavities, and, indeed, so extremely small in size, that to expect any true image, or any image whatever from it, is out of the question.

Richter was much better-natured than Johnson; and took many provoking things with the spirit of a humorist and philosopher; nor can we think that so good a man, even had he foreseen this work of Doering's, would have gone the length of assassinating him for it. Doering is a person we have known for several years, as a compiler, and translator, and ballad

Au

monger, whose grand enterprise, however, is his Gallery of Weimar Authors; a series of strange little biographies, beginning with Schiller, and already extending over Wieland and Herder,-now comprehending, probably by conquest, Klopstock also, and lastly, by a sort of droit d'aubaine, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, neither of whom belonged to Weimar. thors, it must be admitted, are happier than the old painter with his cocks: for they write, naturally and without fear of ridicule or offence, the name and description of their work on the title-page; and thenceforth the purport and tendency of each volume remains indisputable. Doering is sometimes lucky in this privilege; for his manner of composition, being so peculiar, might now and then occasion difficulty, but for this precaution. His biographies he works up simply enough. He first ascertains, from the Leipzig Conversationslexicon or Jörden's Poetical Lexicon, Flögel, or Koch, or other such Compendium or Handbook, the aate and place of the proposed individual's birth, his parentage, trade, appointments, and the titles of his works; (the date of his death you al ready know from the newspapers;) this serves as a foundation for the edifice. He then goes through his writings, and all other writings where he or his pursuits are treated of, and whenever he finds a passage with his name in it, he cuts it out, and carries it away. In this manner a mass of materials is collected, and the building now proceeds apace. Stone is laid on the top of stone, just as it comes to hand; a trowel or two of biographic mortar, if perfectly convenient, being perhaps spread in here and there, by way of cement; and so the strangest pile suddenly arises; amorphous, pointing every way but to the zenith,-here a block of granite, there a mass of pipe-clay; till the whole finishes, when the materials are finished,-and you leave it standing to posterity, like some miniature Stonehenge, a perfect architectural enigma.