ABSTRACT
English; it is one of our great biographies. You had a moving, tragic story to tell, and you have told it plainly and honestly, with no concealments, no nonsense. You have trusted to our intelligence-and we appreciate it. Would to God that all biographers might have that generous faith! What would I not give, for example, to read such a biography of John Ruskin! He had some dark shadow in his life, which colored all his work; but I, one of his soul’s children, am forbidden to know about it-because, forsooth, a solemn British jack-ass, the official biographer, has stuck his long ears as a screen between us.
