in the heroes of the 'Iliad;' there is a sameness in the
historical heroes of Greece and Rome. A man is great as he contends best
with the circumstances of his age, and those who fight best with the
same circumstances, of course grow like each other. And so with our own
age--if we really could have the lives of our best men written for us
(and written well, by men who knew what to look for, and what it was on
which they should insist), they would be just as like as each other too,
and would for that reason be of such infinite usefulness. They would not
be like the old Ideals. Times are changed; they were one thing, we have
to be another--their enemies are not ours. There is a moral
metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lineament of form
or feature remains identical; yet surely not because less is demanded of
us--not less, but more--more, as we are again and again told on Sundays
from the pulpits; if the preachers would but tell us in what that 'more'
consists. The loftiest teaching we ever hear is, that we are to work in
the spirit of love; but we are still left to generalities, while action
divides and divides into ever smaller details. It is as if the Church
said to the painter or to the musician whom she was training, you must
work in the spirit of love and in the spirit of truth; and then adding,
that the Catholic painting or the Catholic music was what he was _not_
to imitate, supposed that she had sent him out into the world equipped
fully for his enterprise.

And what comes of this? Emersonianism has come, modern hagiology has
come, and Ainsworth novels and Bulwer novels, and a thousand more
unclean spirits. We have cast out the Catholic devil, and the Puritan
has swept the house and garnished it; but as yet we do not see any
symptoms showing of a healthy incoming tenant, and there may be worse
states than Catholicism. If we wanted proof of the utter spiritual
disintegration into which we have fallen, it would be enough that we
have no biographies. We do not mean that we have no written lives of our
fellow-creatures; there are enough and to spare. But not any one is
there in which the ideal tendencies of this age can be discerned in
their true form; not one, or hardly any one, which we could place in a
young man's hands, with such warm confidence as would let us say of
it--'Read that; there is a man--such a man as you ought to be; read it,
meditate on it; see what he was, and how he made himself wh