Biographia Britannica

“ There is considerable and unnecessary exaggeration of the merits of British poets, even of second- and third-rate British poets. Evangelical criticism predominates, and respectability is the measure of merit. Furthermore, the true value of poetry in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United States is minimized, and many writers of these countries who unquestionably should have a place in an encyclopædia as large as the Britannica, are omitted. ”

“ Throughout his life he had pursued with devotion and industry the ideals with which he had set out, and his journal and letters display a noble simplicity of disposition and an unswerving honesty of purpose. He was a prolific writer, and at the time of his death he occupied the foremost position in England both as a logician and as an economist. ”

“ We may fairly commence the following remarks with unqualified praise of a work of art, which is intended to honour the distinguished men of science who were living in Great Britain early in the present century, and who, with one surviving exception, having passed into a deathless fame, are yet remembered by philosophers equally great, who were their contemporaries. ”

“ His writings are marked by terse and lucid expression, and his theory of work is well illustrated by the noble words found in one of his notebooks, which have been adopted as a motto for the publications of the institution: ‘Every man is a valuable member of society who by his observations, researches, and experiments procures knowledge for men.’ Although he deeply felt the circumstances of his birth, he was proud of his descent, and once wrote: ‘The best blood of England flows in my veins. ”

“ On the demand of the college he resigned his fellowship at Oxford, and mainly at least supported himself by writing, contributing largely to Fraser’s Magazine and the Westminster Review. The excellence of his style was soon generally recognized. The first two volumes of his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada appeared in 1856, and the work was completed in 1870. As an historian he is chiefly remarkable for literary excellence, for the art with which he represents his conception of the past. ”

“ It was then that the moral, the philanthropic, the religious ideas which have moulded English society into its present shape first broke the spiritual torpor of the eighteenth century. It was then that with the wider diffusion of intelligence our literature woke to a nobler and larger life which fitted it to become the mouthpiece of every national emotion. ”

“ It is a remarkable fact that, while the lighter literature of England was thus becoming a nuisance and a national disgrace, the English genius was effecting in science a revolution which will, to the end of time, be reckoned among the highest achievements of the human intellect. ”

“ One of the greatest moral philosophers of Britain justly observes, that of all the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is read with the greatest eagerness, and may with the greatest facility and effect be applied to the purposes of life is biography ”

“ But he enriched English literature with a 'just history', as distinct from annals and chronicles. [5] 'I am not altogether ignorant', he said, 'in the Lawes of Historie, and of the Kindes.' When we read his lives and commendations of the great men of antiquity as he pictured them, we cannot but regret that the same talents, the same overmastering interest in the eternal human problems, had not been employed in depicting men whom he had actually known. ”

“ Or if, by some neglect, either of his own or his parents, a young English gentleman of fortune has allowed the first years of youth to fly unimproved, and has attained the age of seventeen or eighteen with little literary knowledge, I know no place where he may have a better chance of recovering what he has lost than in this city. He may have a choice of men of eminence, in every branch of literature, to assist him in his studies, a great proportion of whom are men of genius, and as amiable in their manners as they are eminent in their particular professions. ”

“ KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end of political education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature had little or no value outside of England. ”

“ It must not be supposed, however, that the higher classes in Great Britain were universally polished, or free from gross faults, at the time he came. There were many, it is true, in England, as probably will always be the case, who, in point of demeanour, as well as virtue--of genius, as well as goodness, excelled any others on the earth. ”

“ In classical erudition, which by the custom of England is more peculiarly called learning, he was inferior to few professed scholars. Like all men of genius, he delighted to take refuge in poetry, from the vulgarity and irritation of business. ”

“ It would be far easier to enumerate the great men who have known him and owed him nothing than to reckon up the names of those who are far more indebted to him than they can say. All the real intellectual life of England since his day has been stamped by his genius, all her creative spirits have imbibed their life's nourishment from his works. ”

“ He was the typical embodiment of the strength and weakness, the common sense masked by grotesque prejudice, and the genuine sentiment underlying a rough outside, which characterise the ‘true-born Englishman of the eighteenth century.’ He was the first author who, living by his pen alone, preserved absolute independence of character, and was as much respected for his high morality as for his intellectual power. ”

“ See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution, and how the young thinkers are at work! See, in Great Britain, how the dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday, gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual harmonies! ”

“ In this way one thousand and thirty names were obtained of men and women who represent the flower of British genius during historical times, only excluding those persons who were alive at the end of the last century. ”

“ It is not probable that he devoted himself very seriously to study, but intercourse with his intellectual equals braced his faculties, and he returned to England with the tone and bearing of a scholar and a gentleman. ”

“ I much prefer the condition of an English gentleman of the better class, to that of any potentate in Europe,--whether for travel, or for opportunity of society, or for access to means of science or study, or for mere comfort and easy healthy relation to people at home.
Such, as we have seen, is the wealth of England, a mighty mass, and made good in whatever details we care to explore. The cause and spring of it is the wealth of temperament in the people. The wonder of Britain is this plenteous nature. Her worthies are ever surrounded by as good men as themselves ”

“ Great Britain in this generation has had more than one scholar of note whose brilliant form of statement, ingenious theories, and varied attainments have sufficed to give them undue authority on subjects where they made some grievous errors. ”

“ Renaissance humanism came into being in the nation. In this development, scholars in London, Oxford, and Cambridge emphasized the value of classical learning, especially Platonism and the study of Greek literature as the means of better understanding and writing. ”

“ Unlike the United States, Great Britain came to the nineteenth century with a great galaxy of famous writers, leading back through many centuries. The eighteenth century is rich in great names, including among its poets Pope, Burns, Cowper, Gray and Thompson ”

“ Thus biography, or the deeds or thoughts of illustrious men, still forms a most important, and certainly the most interesting, part even of general history; and the perfection of that noble art consists, not in the exclusive delineation of individual achievement, or the concentration of attention on general causes, but in the union of the two in due proportions, as they really exist in nature, and determine, by their combined operation, the direction of human affairs. The talent now required in the historian partakes, accordingly, of this two-fold character. ”

“ Indeed, the more we study those 50 or 60 years which embrace the so-called Elizabethan period, the more are we struck by the fact that, ever since, we have been simply making variations upon the themes, which the men of those times gave us. Modern science, [65] modern poetry, modern drama, sat like pages at the feet of the Great Queen. Among these the novel cut but an insignificant figure, although it was the novel which had perhaps the longest future before it. We need not wonder therefore that our first English novelist has been treated by many with neglect. ”

“ The Elizabethan era is justly regarded as the brightest in English history; not for the number of its great men, or the magnificence of its great enterprises, or the triumphs of its great discoveries and inventions, but because there were then born the great ideas which constitute the strength and beauty of our proud civilization, and because then the grandest questions which pertain to religion, government, literature, and social life were first agitated, with the freshness and earnestness of a revolutionary age. The men of that period were a constellation of original thinkers. ”

“ At the time of the Renaissance, when writers of knowledge and power were Latinists and scholars, who had been nurtured in an almost superstitious veneration for the ancient classics, the poor playwright or poet in the vernacular tongue was little likely to engage the labours of a learned pen. Those Elizabethan authors whose lives are fairly well known to us were always something other than mere authors men of noble family, it may be, or distinguished in politics and war. ”

“ Who better than the writer of the Essays could have painted a series of miniatures of the courts of Elizabeth and James?
When at last the political upheaval of this century compelled men to leave, whether in histories, or memoirs, or biographies, a record of what they had themselves experienced, the character attained to its full importance and excellence. ”

“ Though unpopular and maligned at this time in England for his immoralities and haughty disdain, he was still the greatest poet of his age, a peer, and a man of transcendent genius of whom any country would be proud. That such a man, embittered and in broken health, should throw his whole soul into the contest, with a disinterestedness which was never questioned, shows not only that he had many noble traits, but that his example would have great weight with enlightened nations, and open their eyes to the necessity of rallying to the cause of liberty. ”

“ But perfectly satisfied of his position, and with his duties clearly defined, he could allow large and increasing play, in the leisure of advancing age, to his natural sympathies, and to the effect of the wonderful spectacle of the world around him. He was, after all, an Englishman; and with all his quickness to detect and denounce what was selfish and poor in English ideas and action, and with all the strength of his deep antipathies, his chief interests were for things English—English literature, English social life, English politics, English religion. ”

“ We must think of him, I believe, as a good, honest-minded, well-meaning man; dull, I dare say as a preacher; diffuse, meandering, homely and lumbering as a poet; yet touching with raw and lively colors the griefs of England's country-poor; and with a realism that is hard to match, painting the flight of petrels and of the curlew, {239} and the great sea waves that gather and roll and break along his lines. ”

“ His great object was not merely to make his pupils philosophers, but to render them good men, pious Christians, loyal to their king, and attached to the British constitution; pure in morals, happy in the consciousness of a right conduct, and friends to all mankind. ”

“ So in studying the life of one Englishman, great in the sense that everything he did was big, honourable, clever, and brave, we shall realize how character is formed in the iron mill of experience, how a man unhelped by wealth or social advantages and gifted only with exceptional talents in a line, mainly unprofitable in a worldly sense, came to win through the difficulties and dangers of a more than usually strenuous life and reach the haven of completed work. ”

“ The author of this book will rank, we are free to say, with the very first spirits of the British world. It will live, in our judgment, as long as the English language, and be a text-book of wisdom to the young of all generations of America and England both. We would rather be the author of it, than hold any civil or ecclesiastical office in the globe. We would rather leave it as a legacy to our children, than the richest estate ever owned by man. ”

“ In addition to his celebrity as a poet, he is one of the most elegant scholars which America has produced, and, until recently, held the professorship of modern languages at the neighbouring university of Cambridge. ”

“ From 1908 onwards he spoke at many centres in Great Britain; and his personal dignity, the moderation of his tone, and the magnanimity which was his best characteristic, contributed more than the work of all other men to change England's policy on this question. ”

“ The life the poet lived, in a popular sense, lacked all that usually attracts the masses, for he was personally little known to his generation, rarely seen among large gatherings of the people, and, great Englishman as he was, was almost a stranger, in his later years at least, in the English metropolis, or, if we except the seats of the universities, in any of the chief towns of the kingdom. ”