Many embarrassments attend the publication of memoirs relating to a living person. The events of any life still in progress are necessarily entangled with those of many other such lives. Susceptibili ties of a reasonable and unreasonable kind have to be consulted at every turn, and passages in the story to be told, that, for the sake of the interests princi pally concerned, one would wish elucidated with the fullest detail, must sometimes be treated with reserve merely because such and such people who would have to be brought under notice in connection with them, shrink from publicity, or perhaps claim immu nity from the criticism to which they would have to be subject if the fullest justice were done to the central figure in the picture. Then, in regard to the central figure, if it be that of a person who stands for any reason at all prominently before the world.