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!_ of
conscience. 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 absorbed into and diluted by it. But we think
Horace was right in putting tyrant 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 with a more continuous
strain, than any other form of society. In Josiah Quincy we have an
example of character trained and shaped, under the nearest approach to a
pure democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, and
self-centred poise that recall the finer types of antiquity, in whom the
public and private man was so wholly of a piece that they were truly
everywhere at home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the
hearth carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum. The phrase "a
great public character," once common, seems to be going out of fashion,
perhaps because there are fewer examples of the thing. It fits Josiah
Quincy exactly. Active in civic and academic duties till beyond the
ordinary period of man, at fourscore and ten his pen, voice, and
venerable presence were still efficient in public affairs. A score of
years after the energies of even vigorous men are declining or spent,
his mind and character made themselves felt as in their prime. A true
pillar of house and state, he stood unflinchingly upright under whatever
burden might be laid upon him. The French Revolutionists aped what was
itself but a parody of the elder republic, with their hair _a la_ Brutus
and their pedantic moralities _a la_ Cato Minor, but this man
unconsciously was the antique Roman they laboriously went about to be.
Others have filled places more conspicuous, few have made the place they
filled so conspicuous by an exact and disinterested performance of duty.

In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son, there is something of the
provincialism of which we have spoken as inherent in most American works
of the kind. His was a Boston