Excerpt from Henry Dundas Viscount Melville
The object of the writer, therefore, in View of what has been said, is, from the materials now available, to delineate a character rather than to unfold a history; to portray a personality rather than to describe a political career. Even in doing so, he is perhaps writing the truest biography. It has been said that Plutarch is the greatest of biographers, because his object was to make a living portrait of a man’s inner nature rather than to write the annals of his external acts. I am not writing Histories, but Lives, he said. Very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person’s real character, more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles. The aim of the present writer, whether successful or not, is to depict somewhat in the spirit of Plutarch the foremost Scotsman of the eighteenth century. He makes no apology for his work.
Everything is of interest that deals with the marvellous galaxy, which sparkled and flourished in that wonderful time. We read in The Young Duke how, when Lord Seymour Temple began a story at White’s about Fox and General Fitzpatrick, there was a general retreat, and the bore, adds the novelist, as Sir Boyle Roche would say like the last rose of summer, remains talking to himself.
Are there not many of us who would tolerate even bores to-day, if the staple of their talk was stories about Fox and Fitzpatrick and the other statesmen of that brilliant age?
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