A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 81 



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 true? 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 delocalise 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 

 &quot; capital &quot; 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 

 colonel ; and from ^schylus, who fought at Marathon, to 

 Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low Countries, the 



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