Biography & Autobiography Books

DONATELLO The materials for a biography of Donatello are so scanty, that his life and personality can only be studied in his works. The Renaissance gave birth to few men of productive genius whose actual careers are so little known. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Donatello composed no treatise on his art; he wrote no memoir or commentary, no sonnets, and indeed scarcely a letter of his even on... more...

Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold. [Pepys was successfully cut for the stone on March 26th, 1658. See March 26th below. Although not suffering from this cause again until the end of his life, there are frequent references in the Diary to pain whenever he caught cold. In a letter from Pepys to his nephew... more...

Chapter 1. Parentage: introduction to the royal institution: earliestexperiments: first royal society paper: marriage. It has been thought desirable to give you and the world some image of MICHAEL FARADAY, as a scientific investigator and discoverer. The attempt to respond to this desire has been to me a labour of difficulty, if also a labour of love. For however well acquainted I may be with the... more...

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. We have again to present to our friends the Report of the Annual Mortality in the Society of Friends, in Great Britain and Ireland.  It has frequently been observed, how nearly the number of deaths in each year has approximated, but we have this year to notice a considerable diminution in the annual return.  We are not disposed, however, to attribute the diminished numbers,... more...

FOREWORD Time, though a good Collector, is not always a reliable Historian. That is to say, that although nothing of interest or importance is lost, yet an affair may be occasionally invested with a glamour that is not wholly its own. I venture to think that Piracy has fortuned in this particular. We are apt to base our ideas of Piracy on the somewhat vague ambitions of our childhood; and I suppose,... more...

I A BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE In July of 1904 the eighty-seven mortal years of George Frederick Watts came to an end. He had outlived all the contemporaries and acquaintances of his youth; few, even among the now living, knew him in his middle age; while to those of the present generation, who knew little of the man though much of his work, he appeared as members of the Ionides family, thus inaugurating the... more...

ABRAHAM’S FOUR SURRENDERS A great many people are afraid of the will of God, and yet I believe that one of the sweetest lessons that we can learn in the school of Christ is the surrender of our wills to God, letting Him plan for us and rule our lives. If I know my own mind, if an angel should come from the throne of God and tell me that I could have my will done the rest of my days on earth, and that... more...

CHAPTER I INTRODUCES ONE YOUNG MAN The boys in the office were, I fancy, a bit prejudiced against him before he arrived. It wasn't his fault, for he was a stranger to them all, but it got about that the dear old "chief" had decided to engage a real good Sunday-school boy. Someone had heard him say, or, more likely, thought it would be funny to imagine him saying, that the advent of such a... more...

NOTICES LIFE OF LORD BYRON. Having landed the young pilgrim once more in England, it may be worth while, before we accompany him into the scenes that awaited him at home, to consider how far the general character of his mind and disposition may have been affected by the course of travel and adventure, in which he had been, for the last two years, engaged. A life less savouring of poetry and romance... more...

LETTER 272. TO MR. MURRAY. "Venice, April 9. 1817. "Your letters of the 18th and 20th are arrived. In my own I have given you the rise, progress, decline, and fall, of my recent malady. It is gone to the devil: I won't pay him so bad a compliment as to say it came from him;—he is too much of a gentleman. It was nothing but a slow fever, which quickened its pace towards the end of its... more...