But the spirit and
custom of the age confided to future generations the duty of first
offering him the more formal honour of prosaic and critical biography.
The biographic memoir, which consists of precise and duly
authenticated dates and records of domestic and professional
experiences and achievements, was in England a comparatively late
growth. It had no existence when Shakespeare died. It began to blossom
in the eighteenth century, and did not flourish luxuriantly till a far
more recent period. Meagre seeds of the modern art of biography were,
indeed, sown within a few years of Shakespeare's death; but outside
the unique little field of Izaak Walton's tillage, the first
sproutings were plants so different from the fully developed tree,
that they can with difficulty be identified with the genus. Apart from
Izaak Walton's exceptional efforts, the biographical spirit first
betrayed itself in England in slender, occasional pamphlets of
rhapsodical froth, after the model of the funeral sermon. There
quickly followed more substantial volumes of collective biography,
which mainly supplied arbitrarily compiled, if extended, catalogues of
names. To each name were attached brief annotations, which
occasionally offered a fact or a date, but commonly consisted of a few
sentences of grotesque, uncritical eulogy.
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