82 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



list of martial civilians is a long one. A man s education 

 seems more complete who has smelt hostile powder from a 

 less Eesthetic 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 Scari- 

 deroon. 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 

 come 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 shifti 

 ness, 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 sub 

 ject 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 con 

 sequence than all other faculties together ; and democracy, 



