64 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



not these things done in a corner? Notoriety may be 

 achieved in a narrow sphere, but fame demands for its evi 

 dence a more distant and prolonged reverberation. To the 

 world at large we were but a short column of figures in the 

 corner of a blue-book, New England exporting so much salt 

 fish, timber, and Medford rum, Virginia so many hogsheads 

 of tobacco, and buying with the proceeds a certain amount 

 of English manufactures. The story of our early colonisation 

 had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was altogether 

 inferior in picturesque fascination to that of Mexico or Peru. 

 The lives of our worthies, like that of our nation, are bare of 

 those foregone and far-reaching associations with names, the 

 divining-rods of fancy, which the soldiers and civilians of the 

 Old -World get for nothing by the mere accident of birth. 

 Their historians and biographers have succeeded to the good 

 will, as well as to the long-established stand, of the shop of 

 glory. Time is, after all, the greatest of poets, and the sons 

 of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame. 

 The philosophic poet may find a proud solace in saying, 



Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante 

 Trita solo ; 



but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece and 

 Rome behind him, and can begin his poem with invoking a 

 goddess from whom legend derived the planter of his race. 

 His eyes looked out on a landscape saturated with glorious 

 recollections; he had seen Caesar, and heard Cicero. But 

 who shall conjure with Saugus or Cato Four Corners, with 

 Israel Putnam or Return Jonathan Meigs? We have been 

 transplanted, and for us the long hierarchical succession of 

 history is broken. The Past has not laid its venei able hands 

 upon us in consecration, conveying to us that mysterious in 

 fluence whose force is in its continuity. We are to Europe 

 as the Church of England to her of Rome. The latter old 

 lady may be the Scarlet Woman, or the Beast with ten horns, 

 if you will; but hers are all the heirlooms, hers that vast spi 

 ritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet everywhere, whose 

 revenues are none the less fruitful for being levied on the 

 imagination. We may claim that England s history is also 

 ours, but it is a de jure, and not a de facto property that we 

 have in it, something that may be proved indeed, yet is a 

 merely intellectual satisfaction, and does not savour of the 

 realty. Have we not seen the mockery crown and sceptre 



