A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 71 



colonel; and from ^Eschylus, who fought at Marathon, to Ben 

 Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low Countries, the list of 

 martial civilians is a long one. A man s education seems 

 more complete who has smelt hostile powder from a less 

 aesthetic distance than Goethe. It raises our confidence in Sir 

 Kenelm Digby as a physicist, that he is able to illustrate some 

 theory of acoustics in his Treatise of Bodies by instancing the 

 effect of his guns in a sea-fight off Scanderoon. One would 

 expect the proportions of character to be enlarged by such 

 variety and contrast of experience. Perhaps it will by-and- 

 by appear that our own Civil War has done something for us 

 in this way. Colonel Higginson comes down from his pulpit 

 to draw on his jackboots, and thenceforth rides in our 

 imagination alongside of John Bunyan and Bishop Compton. 

 To have stored moral capital enough to meet the drafts of 

 Death at sight must be an unmatched tonic. We saw our 

 light-hearted youth some back with the modest gravity of 

 age, as if they had learned to throw out pickets against a 

 surprise of any weak point in their temperament. Perhaps 

 that American shiftiness, so often complained of, may not 

 be so bad a thing, if, by bringing men acquainted with every 

 humour of fortune and human nature, it puts them in fuller 

 possession of themselves. 



But with whatever drawbacks in special circumstances, the 

 main interest of biography must always lie in the amount 

 of character or essential manhood which the subject of it 

 reveals to us, and events are of import only as means to that 

 end. It is true that lofty and far-seen exigencies may give 

 greater opportunity to some men, whose energy is more 

 sharply spurred by the shout of a multitude than by the 

 grudging Well done ! of conscience. Some theorists have 

 too hastily assumed that, as the power of public opinion 

 increases, the force of private character, or what we call 

 originality, is absorbed into and diluted by it. But we think 

 Horace was right in putting tyrant and mob on a level as 

 the trainers and tests of a man s solid quality. The amount 

 of resistance of which one is capable to whatever lies outside 

 the conscience is of more consequence than all other faculties 

 together ; and democracy, perhaps, tries this by pressure in 

 more directions, and with a more continuous strain, than 

 any other form of society. In Josiah Quincy we have an 

 example of character trained and shaped, under the nearest 



