98 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



secondary and subservient. We are fond in this country 

 of what are called self-made men (as if real success could 

 ever be other) ; and this is all very well, provided they 

 make something worth having of themselves. Otherwise 

 it is not so well, and the examples of such are at best 

 but stuff for the Alnaschar dreams of a false democracy. 

 The gist of the matter is, not where a man starts from, 

 but where he comes out. We are glad to have the 

 biography of one who, beginning as a gentleman, kept 

 himself such to the end, — who, with no necessity of 

 labor, left behind him an amount of thoroughly done 

 work such as few have accomplished with the mighty 

 help of hunger. Some kind of pace may be got out of 

 the veriest jade by the near prospect of oats ; but the 

 thorough-bred has the spur in his blood. 



Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father's 

 life with the skill and good taste that might have been 

 expected from the author of " Wensley." Considering 

 natural partialities, he has shown a discretion of which 

 we are oftener reminded by missing than by meeting it. 

 He has given extracts enough from speeches to show 

 their bearing and quality, — from letters, to recall by- 

 gone modes of thought and indicate many-sided friendly 

 relations with good and eminent men ; above all, he has 

 lost no opportunity to illustrate that life of the past, 

 near in date, yet alien in manners, whose current glides 

 so imperceptibly from one generation into another that 

 we fail to mark the shiftings of its bed or the change in 

 its nature wrought by the affluents that discharge into 

 it on all sides, — here a stream bred in the hills to 

 sweeten, there the sewerage of some great city to cor- 

 rupt. We cannot but lament that Mr. Quincy did not 

 earlier begin to keep a diary. " Miss not the discourses 

 of the elders," though put now in the Apocrypha, is a 

 wise precept, but incomplete unless we add, " Nor cease 



