ice Fuller said with singular felicity:

"Mr. Justice Lamar always underrated himself. This tendency
plainly sprung from a vivid imagination. With him the splendid
passions attendant upon youth never faded into the light of
common day, but they kept before him as an ideal, the impossibility
of whose realization, as borne in upon him from time to time,
opposed him with a sense of failure. Yet the conscientiousness
of his work was not lessened, nor was the acuteness of his
intellect obscured by these natural causes of his discontent;
nor did a certain Oriental dreaminess of the temperament ever
allure him to abandon the effort to accomplish something that
would last after his lips were dumb."

Matthew Arnold says in one of his essays that Americans lack
distinction. I have a huge liking for Matthew Arnold. He
had a wonderful intellectual vision. I do not mean to say
that his three lectures on translating Homer are the greatest
literary work of our time. But I think, on the whole, that
I should rather have the pair of intellectual eyes which can
see Homer as he saw him, than any other mental quality I can
think of. But Mr. Arnold has never seemed to me to be fortunate
in his judgment about Americans. He allows this quality of
distinction to Grant, but denies it, for all the world, to
Abraham Lincoln. The trouble with Mr. Arnold is that he
never travelled in the United States, when on this side the
Atlantic. He spent his time with a few friends who had little
love for things American. He visited a great city or two,
but never made himself acquainted with the American people.
He never knew the sources of our power, or the spirit of our
people.

Yet there is a good deal of truth in what he says of the
Americans of our time. It is still more true of the Englishmen
of our time. The newspaper, and the telegraph, and the telephone,
and the constant dissemination of news, the public library
and the common school and college mix up all together and
tend to make us, with some rare and delightful exceptions,
eminently commonplace. Certainly the men who are sent to
Congress do not escape this wearying quality. I know men
who have been in public office for more than a generation,
who have had enormous power and responsibility, to whom the
country is indebted for safety and happiness, who never said
a foolish thing, and rarely ever when they had the chance
failed to do a wise one, who are utterly commonplace. You