A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 69 



taken on trust, but we may be sure that true gold will be 

 equally persuasive the world over. Real manhood and honest 

 achievement are nowhere provincial, but enter the select 

 society of all time on an even footing. 



Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look into. 

 Those Catharine -wheel republics, always in revolution while 

 the powder lasts, and sure to burn the fingers of whoever 

 attempts intervention, have also their great men, as placidly 

 ignored by us as our own by jealous Europe. The following 

 passage from the life of Don Simon Bolivar might allay many 

 motus animorum, if rightly pondered. Bolivar, then a youth, 

 was travelling in Italy, and his biographer tells us that, 

 * near Castiglione he was present at the grand review made 

 by Napoleon of the columns defiling into the plain large 

 enough to contain sixty thousand men. The throne was situ 

 ated on an eminence that overlooked the plain, and Napoleon 

 on several occasions looked through a glass at Bolivar and 

 his companions, who were at the base of the hill. The hero 

 Caesar could not imagine that he beheld the liberator of the 

 world of Columbus ! And small blame to him, one would 

 say. We are not, then, it seems, the only foundling of 

 Columbus, as we are so apt to take for granted. The great 

 Genoese did not, as we supposed, draw that first star-guided 

 furrow across the vague of waters with a single eye to the 

 future greatness of the United States. And have we not 

 sometimes, like the enthusiastic biographer, fancied the Old 

 World staring through all its telescopes at us, and wondered 

 that it did not recognise in us what we were fully persuaded 

 we were going to be and do ? 



Our American life is dreadfully barren of those elements 

 of the social picturesque which give piquancy to anecdote. 

 And without anecdote, what is biography, or even history, 

 which is only biography on a larger scale ? Clio, though she 

 take airs on herself, and pretend to be philosophy teaching 

 by example, is, after all, but a gossip who has borrowed 

 Fame s speaking-trumpet, and should be figured with a tea 

 cup instead of a scroll in her hand. How much has she not 

 owed of late to the tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia ? 

 In what gutters has not Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits 

 with which he has put together his admirable mosaic picture 

 of England under the last two Stuarts? Even Mommsen 

 himself, who dislikes Plutarch s method as much as Montaigne 



