A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 91 



not recognize in us what we were fully persuaded we 

 were going to be and do ] 



Our American life is dreadfully barren of those ele- 

 ments of the social picturesque which give piquancy to 

 anecdote. And without anecdote, what is biography, or 

 even history, which is only biography on a larger scale ? 

 Clio, though she take airs on herself, and pretend to be 

 "philosophy teaching by example," is, after all, but a 

 gossip who has borrowed Fame's speaking-trumpet, and 

 should be figured with a tea-cup instead of a scroll in 

 her hand. How much has she not owed of late to the 

 tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia ^ In what gut- 

 ters has riot Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits with 

 which he has put together his admirable mosaic picture 

 of England under the last two Stuarts ] Even Mommsen 

 himself, who dislikes Plutarch's method as much as 

 Montaigne loved it, cannot get or give a lively notion of 

 ancient Rome, without running to the comic poets and 

 the anecdote-mongers. He gives us the very beef-tea 

 of history, nourishing and even palatable enough, excel- 

 lently portable for a memory that must carry her own 

 packs, and can afford little luggage ; but for our own 

 part, we prefer a full, old-fashioned meal, with its side- 

 dishes of spicy gossip, and its last relish, the Stilton 

 of scandal, so it be not too high. One volume of con- 

 temporary memoirs, stuffed though it be with lies, (for 

 lies to be good for anything must have a potential prob- 

 ability, 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 con- 



