"Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history"
About this Quote
That claim carries a quiet critique of "general history" as an accumulation of materials without an organizing mind. Hall is pointing at a problem every reader recognizes: timelines sprawl, causes multiply, and the human brain starts hunting for a plot it can hold. Biography obliges. It gives you motives, turning points, private contradictions - the interior scaffolding that makes public events feel inevitable rather than arbitrary. The subtext is almost theological in its optimism: if you can read one life closely enough, you can detect coherence where the world seems merely busy.
Context matters. Hall is a late-18th/early-19th-century English dissenting clergyman, writing in a culture increasingly hungry for exemplary lives - the saint’s life secularized into the "great man" narrative, and the moral biography marketed as both entertainment and instruction. His emphasis on unity flatters the biographer’s craft while warning about history’s messiness: the world won’t naturally organize itself, so we reach for a single soul and call it understanding. The seduction is real - biography can clarify, and it can also smuggle in meaning by making one life stand in for an era.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Hall, Robert. (2026, January 17). Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/of-all-the-species-of-literary-composition-81382/
Chicago Style
Hall, Robert. "Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/of-all-the-species-of-literary-composition-81382/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/of-all-the-species-of-literary-composition-81382/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
