Cardinal Newman

"THE old-fashioned, official biography, which used to consist in the conscientious assemblage and laborious narration of every fact and incident, relevant or irrelevant, that marked the subject's pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, and the presentation of the amorphous mass in two, and if possible there, portentous volumes as forbidding and almost as heavy as the sepulchral marble, has at length died out, smothered, we may presume, by its own abundance."