We are thankful that the character of
Shakspeare is wrapped safely away from us in un-Boswellable night.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge the man stood forever in the way of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge the poet and metaphysician, and the fault of the
poppy-juice in his nature is laid at the door of the laudanum he bought
of the apothecary. Yet all the drowsy juices of Circe's garden could not
hinder De Quincey from writing his twenty-five volumes. To us nothing is
more painful, and nothing seems more cruelly useless, than the parading
of mortal weaknesses, especially of those to whom we are indebted
for delight and teaching. For an inherent weakness has no lesson of
avoidance in it, being helpless from the first, and by the doom of its
own nature growing more and more helpless to the last, not more so in
the example than in him who is to profit by it, and who is more likely
to have his appetite flattered by good company than his fear aroused by
the evil consequence. Because the swans have a vile habit of over-eating
themselves, shall we nail them to the barn-door as a moral lesson to the
crows?
There is, doubtless, a great deal to be taught by biography; but it is
by the mistakes of men that we learn, and not by their weaknesses. To
see clearly an error of judgment and its consequences may be of positive
service to us in the conduct of life, while a vice of temperament
concerns us not at all in private men, and only so far in statesmen
and rulers as it may have been influential in history as a modifier of
action, or is essential to an understanding of it as an explainer of
motive.
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