70 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



loved it, cannot get or give a lively notion of ancient Rome, 

 without running to the comic poets and the anecdote- 

 mongers. He gives us the very beef-tea of history, nour 

 ishing and even palatable enough, excellently portable for 

 a memory that must carry her own packs, and can afford 

 little luggage ; but for our own part, we prefer a full, old- 

 fashioned meal, with its side-dishes of spicy gossip, and its 

 last relish, the Stilton of scandal, so it be not too high. One 

 volume of contemporary memoirs, stuffed though it be with 

 lies (for lies to be good for anything must have a potential 

 probability, must even be true so far as their moral and 

 social setting is concerned) will throw more light into the 

 dark backward of time than the gravest Camden or Thuanus. 

 If St. Simon is not accurate, is he any the less essentially 

 trite ? No history gives us so clear an understanding of the 

 moral condition of average men after the restoration of the 

 Stuarts as the unconscious blabbings of the Puritan tailor s 

 son, with his two consciences, as it were an inward, still 

 sensitive in spots, though mostly toughened to India-rubber, 

 and good rather for rubbing out old scores than retaining 

 them, and an outward, alert, and termagantly effective in 

 Mrs. Pepys. But we can have no St. Simons or Pepyses till 

 we have a Paris or London to delocalize our gossip and give 

 it historic breadth. All our capitals are fractional, merely 

 greater or smaller gatherings of men, centres of business 

 rather than of action or influence, Each contains so many 

 souls, but is not, as the word capital implies, the true head 

 of a community and seat of its common soul. 



Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic 

 than it once was ? As the clearing away of the woods scants 

 the streams, may not our civilisation have dried up some 

 feeders that helped to swell the current of individual and 

 personal force? We have sometimes thought that the stricter 

 definition and consequent seclusion from each other of the 

 different callings in modern times, as it narrowed the chance 

 of developing and giving variety to character, lessened also 

 the interest of biography. Formerly arts and arms were not 

 divided by so impassable a barrier as now. There was hardly 

 such a thing as a pekin. Caesar gets up from writing his 

 Latin Grammar to conquer Gaul, change the course of 

 history, and make so many things possible among the rest 

 our English language and Shakespeare. Horace had been a 



