In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

When it chances that the dead hero is one who was taken in his prime of life, of whose departure from among us the most far-seeing biographical scribe can have no prophetic inkling, this must be difficult.

Of great men, full of years, who are ripe for the sickle, who in the course of Nature must soon fall, it is of course comparatively easy for an active compiler to have his complete memoir ready in his desk.

But in order that the idea of omnipresent and omniscient information may be kept up, the young must be chronicled as quickly as the old.

In some cases this task must, one would say, be difficult.