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Show The Vogue Of Reading Librarians report surprising increase in the demand for biographies, attributable, largely, to the intimate, not to say tabloid, treatment of the personages by the very modern biographers. The idea is that the more or less dry and chronological records of the thoughts and deeds of the great have been supplanted by relations of their intimate, personal affairs, their didoes, you might say, to the satisfaction and delight of many readers of the going literature. Some such psychological movement as that which has retired "the legitimate" from the stage. There has been, recently, a great spurt to the libraries for the latest biographies biog-raphies of the good and great George Washington, since it was discovered that he made his own beer, took quite an interest in ladies, cussed like a golfer with 198 strokes charged against him, and iwas otherwise rather human.! Similar effects have been produced by the late biographies of Disraeli, Franklin, Barnum, Jackson and others. The psychology of the mass turns from the splendid philosophy of a Shakespeare, or the great capacities of a I Franklin to something like the 100-foot film kiss to the movie screen. Man may have been made but little lower than the angels, but, sometimes, it looks just as if some of the i angelic had been left out of his psychology. |