Excerpt from A Scholar of the Twelfth Century It is hard for us to realize that this should be so. In the broad glare of light cast by the press of modern times upon the words and acts of the most inconspicuous in these days, in particular, when no privacy, however secluded. No obscurity, however pro found, can be trusted to save any one from the reporter that walks in darkness, or the interviewer that wastes at noon-day, it scarcely seems possible that the life of any man of great emi nence could escape being known to contemporaries and handed down to posterity. Yet this will not appear so strange when we come to consider how little is the acquaintance most of us have with the details that make up the biography of the most conspicuous living men of letters. How many of the admirers of Tennyson, for instance, who for thirty years has occupied the foremost place in English literature, could give any but vague and fragmentary particulars of his personal history? But however it may be at present, obviously the only cer tain way for a man of the past to make sure that his acts would be perpetuated was for him to write an account of them himself. Simple as the expedient may appear, it took ages to discover it. Antiquity seems to have known nothing of auto biography, strictly so called. In works like the Commentaries of Caesar, the personal interest belonging to the man is entirely swallowed up in the more absorbing interest of the events he describes. The former is, indeed, so subordinate to the latter that it can scarcely be said to exist at all. In the genuine auto biography the man himself must be the center about which everything else revolves: and events that take place in his time are described only as they impart additional interest to his own words or deeds. The practice is now so common that it seems to us as if it must always have existed. Yet the work of which a slight account is to be given here, is perhaps one of the earliest of its kind known to literary history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.