A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 75 



became a reality to the eyes of this generation. The New 

 England breed is running out, we are told ! This was in 

 all ways a beautiful and fortunate life fortunate in the 

 goods of this world fortunate, above all, in the force of 

 character which makes fortune secondary and subservient. 

 We are fond in this country of what are called self-made 

 men (as if real success could ever be other) ; and this is all 

 very well, provided they make something worth having of 

 themselves. Otherwise it is not so well, and the examples 

 of such are at best but stuff for the Alnaschar dreams of a 

 false democracy. The gist of the matter is, not where a 

 man starts from, but where he comes out. We are glad to 

 have the biography of one who, beginning as a gentleman, 

 kept himself such to the end who, with no necessity of 

 labour, left behind him an amount of thoroughly done work 

 such as few have accomplished with the mighty help of 

 hunger. Some kind of pace may be got out of the veriest 

 jade by the near prospect of oats ; but the thoroughbred has 

 the spur in his blood. 



Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father s life 

 with the skill and good taste that might have been expected 

 from the author of Wensley. Considering natural partial 

 ities, he has shown a discretion of which we are oftener 

 reminded by missing than by meeting it. He has given 

 extracts enough from speeches to show their bearing and 

 quality from letters, to recall bygone modes of thought and 

 indicate many-sided friendly relations with good and emi 

 nent men ; above all, he has lost no opportunity to illustrate 

 that life of the past, near in date, yet alien in manners, 

 whose current glides so imperceptibly from one generation 

 into another that we fail to mark the shiftings of its bed or 

 the change in its nature wrought by the affluents that dis 

 charge into it on all sides here a stream bred in the hills to 

 sweeten, there the sewerage of some great city to corrupt. 

 We cannot but lament that Mr. Quincy did not earlier begin 

 to keep a diary. Miss not the discourses of the elders, 

 though put now in the Apocrypha, is a wise precept, but in 

 complete unless we add, Nor cease from recording what 

 soever thing thou hast gathered therefrom so ready is 

 Oblivion with her fatal shears. The somewhat greasy heap 

 of a literary rag-and-bone-picker, like Athenasus, is turned to 

 gold by time. Even the Virgilium mdi tantum of Dryden 



