enthusiastic
biographer, fancied the Old World staring through all its telescopes at
us, and wondered that it did not recognize in us what we were fully
persuaded we were _going_ to be and do?

Our American life is dreadfully barren of those elements of the social
picturesque which give piquancy to anecdote. And without anecdote, what
is biography, of 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 teacup
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 gutters has
not 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,
excellently 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
contemporary memoirs, stuffed though it be with lies, (for lies to be
good for anything must have a potential probability, 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 consciences, 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 fractional, merely greater or smaller gatherings of men, centres of
business rather than of a