y knows
how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather
than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of
national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it, The potent
traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of
all the griefs and trials of man is hidden beneath its words. It is the
representative of his best moments, and all that has been about him of
soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him for
ever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has
never dimmed and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of
the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about
him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible." [194]

It would, indeed, be difficult to overestimate the influence which the
lives of the great and good have exercised upon the elevation of human
character. "The best biography," says Isaac Disraeli, "is a reunion with
human existence in its most excellent state." Indeed, it is impossible
for one to read the lives of good men, much less inspired men,
without being unconsciously lighted and lifted up in them, and growing
insensibly nearer to what they thought and did. And even the lives of
humbler persons, of men of faithful and honest spirit, who have done
their duty in life well, are not without an elevating influence upon the
character of those who come after them.

History itself is best studied in biography. Indeed, history is
biography--collective humanity as influenced and governed by individual
men. "What is all history," says Emerson, "but the work of ideas, a
record of the incomparable energy which his infinite aspirations
infuse into man?" In its pages it is always persons we see more than
principles. Historical events are interesting to us mainly in connection
with the feelings, the sufferings, and interests of those by whom they
are accomplished. In history we are surrounded by men long dead, but
whose speech and whose deeds survive. We almost catch the sound of their
voices; and what they did constitutes the interest of history. We never
feel personally interested in masses of men; but we feel and sympathise
with the individual actors, whose biographies afford the finest and most
real touches in all great historical dramas.

Among the great writers of the past, probably the two that have been
most influential in forming the characters of grea