A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 31 



IT is the misfortune of American biography that it 

 must needs be more or less provincial, and that, 

 contrary to what might have been predicted, this qual- 

 ity in it predominates in proportion as the country 

 grows larger. Wanting any great and acknowledged 

 centre of national life and thought, our expansion has 

 hitherto been rather aggregation than growth ; reputa- 

 tions must be hammered out thin to cover so wide a 

 surface, and the substance of most hardly holds out to 

 the boundaries of a single State. Our very history 

 wants unity, and down to the Revolution the attention 

 is wearied and confused by having to divide itself among 

 thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred 

 on a single clew. A sense of remoteness and seclusion 

 comes over us as we read, and we cannot help asking 

 ourselves, " Were not these things done in a corner 1 " 

 Notoriety may be achieved in a narrow sphere, but 

 fame demands for its evidence a more distant and pro- 

 longed reverberation. To the world at large we were 

 but a short column of figures in the corner of a blue- 

 book, New England exporting so much salt-fish, timber, 

 and Medford rum, Virginia so many hogsheads of tobac- 

 co, and buying with the proceeds a certain amount of 

 English manufactures. The story of our early coloniza- 

 tion had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was 

 altogether inferior in picturesque fascination to that of 



* The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son. 



