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Untitled Article
better than high-priests of famine ; that keep choicest china dinnereets , only no dinner to serve therein . Yet such is our biographic appetite , we run trying from shop to shop , with ever new hope ; and , unless we could eat the wind , with ever new disappointment . ' * Thus writes , although in a publication unworthy of him , an author whom the multitude does not yet , and will not soon understand . The biographic aspect here so exclusively dwelt upon , is
indeed not the only aspect under which history may profitably and pleasantly be contemplated : but if we find ourselves disappointed of what it ought to afford us in this kind , most surely our search will be equally vain for all other fruit . If what purports to be the history of any portion of mankind , keep not its promise of making us understand and represent to ourselves what manner of men those were whose story it pretends to be , let it undertake what else it may , it will assuredly perform nothing
* To know our fellow- creature , ' ( we still quote from the same author , ) * to see into him , understand his goings forth , decipher the whole heart of his mystery ; nay , not only to see into him , but even to see out of him , to view the world altogether as he views it ; so that we can theoretically construe him , and could almost practically personate him ; and do now thoroughly discern both what manner of man he is , and what manner of thing he has got to work on and live on /
This is what a perfect biography , could such be obtained , of any single human being , would do for us , or more properly enable us to do for ourselves , and the perfection of a history , considered in its biographic character , would be to accomplish something of the same kind for an entire nation or an entire age . Thus in respect to the French Revolution , though complete insight is not to be had , we should have been thankful for anything that could
have aided us in forming for ourselves even an imperfect picture of the manner in which a Frenchman , at the period of the breaking out of the Revolution lived : what his thoughts were habitually occupied with ; what feelings were excited in him by the universe , or by any of the things that dwell therein ; above all , what things be fixed his desires upon ; what he did for his bread ; what things he cared for besides bread ; with what evils he had to contend , and how he was enabled to bear up against them ; what were his joys ,
what his consolations , and to what extent he was able to attain them . Such clear view of him and of his circumstances , is the basis of all true knowledge and understanding of the Revolution . Having thus learnt to understand a Frenchman of those days , we would next be helped to know , and to bring vividly before our minds , the new circumstances in which the Revolution placed him ; how those circumstances painted themselves to his eyes , "Hjom his point of view ; what , as a consequence of the conception he formed of them , he thought , felt , and didAnot only in the * Article on Biography , in Fraser ' a Magazine for April 1832 , introductory to the admirable article on Boewell ' s Johmon in the Number for the following month .
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508 The F / € ? ich Revolution .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1833, page 508, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2618/page/68/
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