mate as accurate, "Thou sprang'st
forth hero." And Pompilia conceived him rightly, for he minded her of
God. What farther need be said? Is not that panegyric enough for any
man? Because he was so strong, so fearless, so pure, so gifted with
great might to love, so keen to see Pompilia was pure as a babe's
dreams, and the light on his forehead falls from the lattices
overhead--the lattices of heaven--we love him. Had his figure been
fully drawn we should have had a gentleman. Nor are we sure he ought
not to be so catalogued; as he is, we find no fault in him. He minds
us of the morning star.

Two characters in literature since Don Quixote are life-size gentlemen,
and these are Colonel Newcome and King Arthur, as drawn by Thackeray
and Tennyson, men of one era and pure souls. In these characters is
evident deliberation of intent to create gentlemen. This article has
given no heed to biography or history, because these concern themselves
with truth as observed, and are therefore not imaginative. What we are
considering is an ideal person, fashioned after the pattern discovered
in good lives, which happily grow more and more plentiful as years
multiply. Besides, biography can never get at the real man; for
biography is a story of doing, while what we need is a story of soul.
In Boswell's "Johnson" or in Anthony Trollope's "Autobiography" there
is approach to what we care to know; but in the life of Jowett or
Tennyson, though both are admirable specimens of biography, what man
among us but closed those books with a sense of, not dissatisfaction,
but unsatisfaction? What we were really hungry for was not there.
What Jowett was, which made him a part of the life-blood of English
thought and Englishmen--who found that out? Some things never can be
told, unless the poets or prose dramatists tell them. Poetry and
fiction do what history and biography fail to do--make us interior to a
soul's true life.

Colonel Newcome is all gentleman. He hangs a curtain of silence over
one room in his life. To his wife, mother of his beloved Clive, he
will make no reference. Not bad, but frivolous and weak and querulous,
she was; but Colonel Newcome never whispers it. What had made many
misanthropes, made him a better man. No bitterness tainted his spirit.
Pure women put him in a mood of worship, as they ought to put us all.
He could, in conduct, if not in memory, forget hurts and wrongs, which
is one mark of a large spirit.