e guards and
familiars of the antechamber. A man who speaks slowly but moves fast is
generally one who thinks long and acts promptly--a hard hitter, as we
should familiarly say.

It is not always true that a man's character is indicated by his daily
habits, nor that his intellectual tendency is definable by the qualities
of his temper or by his personal tastes. Carlyle was one instance of the
contrary; Lincoln was another; Bismarck was a great third, with his iron
head and his delicate feminine hands. All men who direct, control or
influence the many have a right to be judged by the world according to
their main deeds, to the total exclusion of their private lives. There
are some whose public actions are better than their private ones, out of
all proportion; and there are others who try to redeem the patent sins
of their political necessities by the honest practice of their private
virtues. In some rare, high types, head, heart and hand are balanced to
one expression of power, and every deed is a mathematical function of
all three.

Leo the Thirteenth probably approaches as nearly to such superiority as
any great man now living. As a statesman, his abilities are admitted to
be of the highest order; as a scholar he is undisputedly one of the
first Latinists of our time, and one of the most accomplished writers in
Latin and Italian prose and verse; as a man, he possesses the simplicity
of character which almost always accompanies greatness, together with a
healthy sobriety of temper, habit and individual taste rarely found in
those beings whom we might call 'motors' among men. It is commonly said
that the Pope has not changed his manner of life since he was a simple
bishop. He is, indeed, a man who could not easily change either his
habits or his opinions; for he is of that enduring, melancholic,
slow-speaking, hard-thinking temperament which makes hard workers, and
in which everything tends directly to hard work as a prime object, even
with persons in whose existence necessary labour need play no part, and
far more so with those whose smallest daily tasks hew history out of
humanity in the rough state.

Of the Pope's statesmanship and Latinity the world knows much, and is
sure to hear more, while he lives--most, perhaps, hereafter, when
another and a smaller man shall sit in the great Pope's chair. For he is
a great Pope. There has not been his equal, intellectually, for a long
time, nor shall we presently see his mat