ction or influence. Each contains so many
souls, but is not, as the word "capital" implies, the true head of a
community and seat of its common soul.

Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic than it once
was? As the clearing away of the woods scants the streams, may not our
civilization have dried up some feeders that helped to swell the current
of individual and personal force? We have sometimes thought that the
stricter definition and consequent seclusion from each other of the
different callings in modern times, as it narrowed the chance of
developing and giving variety to character, lessened also the interest
of biography. Formerly arts and arms were not divided by so impassable a
barrier as now. There was hardly such a thing as a _pekin_. Caesar gets
up from writing his Latin Grammar to conquer Gaul, change the course of
history, and make so many things possible,--among the rest our English
language and Shakespeare. Horace had been a colonel; and from AEschylus,
who fought at Marathon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low
Countries, the list of martial civilians is a long one. A man's
education seems more complete who has smelt hostile powder from a less
aesthetic distance than Goethe. It raises our confidence in Sir Kenelm
Digby as a physicist, that he is able to illustrate some theory of
acoustics in his Treatise of Bodies by instancing the effect of his guns
in a sea-fight off Scanderoon. One would expect 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
something for us in this way. Colonel Higginson comes down from his
pulpit to draw on his jackboots, 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 biography must always lie in the amount of character or essential
manhood which the subject of