ist an authentic portrait.

There have been men who greatly influenced the life of their time, whose
reputation has been much greater with posterity than it was with their
contemporaries. Of Wickliffe, the patriarch of the Reformation, our
knowledge is extremely small. He was but as a voice crying in the
wilderness. We do not really know who was the author of 'The Imitation
of Christ'--a book that has had an immense circulation, and exercised
a vast religious influence in all Christian countries. It is usually
attributed to Thomas a Kempis but there is reason to believe that he was
merely its translator, and the book that is really known to be his, [1910]
is in all respects so inferior, that it is difficult to believe that
'The Imitation' proceeded from the same pen. It is considered more
probable that the real author was John Gerson, Chancellor of the
University of Paris, a most learned and devout man, who died in 1429.

Some of the greatest men of genius have had the shortest biographies. Of
Plato, one of the great fathers of moral philosophy, we have no personal
account. If he had wife and children, we hear nothing of them. About the
life of Aristotle there is the greatest diversity of opinion. One says
he was a Jew; another, that he only got his information from a Jew: one
says he kept an apothecary's shop; another, that he was only the son of
a physician: one alleges that he was an atheist; another, that he was a
Trinitarian, and so forth. But we know almost as little with respect to
many men of comparatively modern times. Thus, how little do we know of
the lives of Spenser, author of 'The Faerie Queen,' and of Butler, the
author of 'Hudibras,' beyond the fact that they lived in comparative
obscurity, and died in extreme poverty! How little, comparatively, do
we know of the life of Jeremy Taylor, the golden preacher, of whom we
should like to have known so much!

The author of 'Philip Van Artevelde' has said that "the world knows
nothing of its greatest men." And doubtless oblivion has enwrapt in
its folds many great men who have done great deeds, and been forgotten.
Augustine speaks of Romanianus as the greatest genius that ever lived,
and yet we know nothing of him but his name; he is as much forgotten
as the builders of the Pyramids. Gordiani's epitaph was written in five
languages, yet it sufficed not to rescue him from oblivion.

Many, indeed, are the lives worthy of record that have remained
unwritten. Men