74 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



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, 



&quot; Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante 

 Trita solo ; &quot; 



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 

 venerable hands upon us in consecration, conveying to us 

 that mysterious influence 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 spiritual 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 

 dejure, 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 reality. 

 Have we not seen the mockery crown and sceptre of the 

 exiled Stuarts in St. Peter s 1 the medal struck so lately as 



