It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them...dispassiona… - Lytton Strachey

To us, with our broader outlook, our more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty that it contains.

If this is dying, then I don't think much of it.

... Voltaire ...
The great potentate of the eighteenth century has suffered cruelly indeed at the hands of posterity. Everyone, it is true, has heard of him; but who has read him? It is by his name that ye shall know him, and not by his works. With the exception of his letters, of Candide, of , and a few other of his shorter pieces, the vast mass of his productions has been already consigned to oblivion.