92 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



sciences, 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 delocalize our gossip 

 and give it historic breadth. All our capitals are frac- 

 tional, merely greater or smaller gatherings of men 4 

 centres of business rather than of action or influence. 

 Each contains so many souls, but is not, as the word 

 " capital " 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 civilization have dried 

 up some feeders that helped to swell the current of 

 individual and personal force 1 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 ^Eschylus, who fought at 

 Marathon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low 

 Countries, the list of martial civilians is a long one. A 

 man's education seems more complete who has smelt 

 hostile powder from a less aesthetic distance than Goethe. 

 It raises our confidence in Sir Kenelm Digby as a physi- 

 cist, that he is able to illustrate some theory of acous- 

 tics in his Treatise of Bodies by instancing the effect of 



