A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 93 



his guns in a sea-fight off Scanderoon. One would ex- 

 pect 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 some- 

 thing for us in this way. Colonel Higginson comes 

 down from his pulpit to draw on his jack-boots, 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 shiftiness, so often complained of, may not 

 be so bad a thing, if, by bringing men acquainted with 

 every humor of fortune and human nature, it puts them 

 in fuller possession of themselves. 



But with whatever drawbacks in special circumstances, 

 the main interest of biogTaphy must always lie in the 

 amount of character or essential manhood which the 

 subject 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 I of con- 

 science. 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 ab- 

 sorbed into and diluted by it. But we think Horace 

 ^as right in putting tp'ant 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 consequence than all 

 other faculties together; and democracy, perhaps, tries 

 this by pressure in more directions, and ^vith a more 



