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Hero-worship, Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of 10 — Letters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition has that got into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the door, eager to catch any word that fell from Burns, were doing unconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Bos- 15 well for worshiper. Rousseau had worshipers enough; princes calling on him in his mean garret; the great, the beautiful, doing reverence to the poor moonstruck man. For himself a most portentous contradiction; the two ends of his life not to be brought into harmony. He sits at the 20 tables of grandees; and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot even get his music copied. "By dint of dining out," says he, "I run the risk of dying by starvation at home." For his worshipers too a most questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the test of vital well- 25 being or illbeing to a generation, can we say that these generations are very first-rate? - And yet our heroic Men of Letters do teach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them; intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. (The world has to obey him who thinks 30 and sees in the world.) The world can alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado, — with unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner of it is very alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alter-35 able by any power under the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but whether we believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it; believing it, 40 we shall have to do it. What name or welcome we give him concerns ourselves mainly. It, the

or it, is a point that

new Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Uni

verse, is verily of the nature of a message from on high; 45 and must and will have itself obeyed.

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My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history, his visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanor there were the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him. If we 50 think of it, few heavier burdens could be laid on the strength of a man. So sudden; all common Lionism, which ruins innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fère. Burns, 55 still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a plowman; he is flying to the West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is a ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down jeweled 60 Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! [Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.7

I admire much the way in which Burns met all this. 65 Perhaps no man one could point out was ever so sorely tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness nor affectation: he feels that he there is the man Robert Burns; that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp;" that the celebrity is but 70 the candle-light which will show what man, not in the least make him a better or other man! Alas, it may readily,. unless he look to it, make him a worse man; a wretched inflated windbag, — inflated till he burst, and become a dead lion; for whom, as some one has said, "there is no resurrection 75 of the body"; worse than a living dog! — Burns is admirable here.

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion

hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossible for him to live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered his industry; no place was remote 80 enough from them. He could not get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls into discontents, into miseries, faults; the world getting ever more desolate for him; health, character, peace of mind all gone; -solitary enough now. It is tragical to think of! These 85 men came but to see him; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement: they got their amusement; and the Hero's life went for it!

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A Definition of History

(From essay on History)

Under a limited, and the only practicable shape, History proper, that part of History which treats of remarkable action, has, in all modern as well as ancient times, ranked among the highest arts; and perhaps never stood higher than in these times of ours. For whereas, of old, the charm of History 5 lay chiefly in gratifying our common appetite for the wonderful, for the unknown, and her office was but as that of a Minstrel and Storyteller, she has now farther become a Schoolmistress, and professes to instruct in gratifying. Whether, with the stateliness of that venerable character, 10 she may not have taken up something of its austerity and frigidity; whether, in the logical terseness of a Hume or Robertson, the graceful ease and gay pictorial heartiness of a Herodotus or Froissart may not be wanting, is not the question for us here. Enough that all learners, all inquiring 15 minds of every order, are gathered round her footstool, and reverently pondering her lessons, as the true basis of Wisdom. Poetry, Divinity, Politics, Physics, have each

their adherents and adversaries; each little guild support20 ing a defensive and offensive war for its own special domain; while the domain of History is as a Free Emporium, where all these belligerents peaceably meet and furnish themselves; and Sentimentalist and Utilitarian, Sceptic and Theologian, with one voice advise us: Examine History, for 25 it is "Philosophy teaching by Experience."

Far be it from us to disparage such teaching, the very attempt at which must be precious. Neither shall we too rigidly inquire: How much it has hitherto profited? Whether most of what little practical wisdom men have, has 30 come from study of professed History, or from other less boasted sources; whereby, as matters now stand, a Marlborough may become great in the world's business, with no History save what he derives from Shakspear's Plays? Nay, whether in that same teaching by Experience, historical 35 Philosophy has yet properly deciphered the first element of all science in this kind: What the aim and significance of that wondrous changeful Life it investigates and paints may be? Whence the course of man's destinies in this Earth originated, and whither they are tending? Or, indeed, if 40 they have any course and tendency, are really guided forward by an unseen mysterious Wisdom, or only circle in blind mazes without recognizable guidance? Which questions, altogether fundamental, one might think, in any Philosophy of History, have, since the era when Monkish Annalists were 45 wont to answer them by the long-ago extinguished light of their Missal and Breviary, been by most philosophical Historians only glanced at dubiously and from afar; by many, not so much as glanced at.

The truth is, two difficulties, never wholly surmountable, 50 lie in the way. Before Philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded. Now, overlooking

the former consideration, and with regard only to the latter, let any one who has examined the current of human affairs, and how intricate, perplexed, unfathomable, even when 55 seen into with our own eyes, are their thousandfold blending movements, say whether the true representing of it is easy or impossible. Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men's Lives who constitute society; History is the essence of innumerable Biographies. But if one Biography, 60 nay, our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible to us, how much more must these million; the very facts of which, to say nothing of the purport of them, we know not, and cannot know!

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Once upon a time it was held to be a coarse and shocking circumstance, that some of the characters in these pages are chosen from the most criminal and degraded of London's population.

As I saw no reason, when I wrote this book, why the 5 dregs of life (so long as their speech did not offend the ear) should not serve the purpose of a moral, as well as its froth and cream, I made bold to believe that this same Once upon a time would not prove to be All-time or even a long time. I saw many strong reasons for pursuing my course. I had 10 read of thieves by scores; seductive fellows (amiable for the most part), faultless in dress, plump in pocket, choice in horse-flesh, bold in bearing, fortunate in gallantry, great at a song, a bottle, pack of cards or dice-box, and fit companions for the bravest. But I had never met (except in 15 Hogarth) with the miserable reality. It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really

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