258 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

bus, but hundreds of post-captains, with transit-
telescope, barometer and concentrated soup and
pemmican ; no Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any
number of clever parliamentary and forensic de-
haters; no prophet or saint, but colleges of divin=
ity ; no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap
press, reading-rooms and book-clubs without num-
ber. There was never such a miscellany of facts.
The world extends itself like American trade. We
conceive Greek or Roman life, life in the hliddle
Ages, to be a simple and comprehensible affair ; but
modern life to respect a multitude of things, which
is distracting.

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity ;
hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and happy to
cope with this rolling miscellany of facts and sci-
ences, and by his own versatility to dispose of them
with ease; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the
variety of coats of convention with which life had
got encrusted, easily able by his subtlety to pierce
these and to draw his strength from nature, with
which he lived in full communion. What is
strange too, he lived in a small town, in a petty
state, in a defeated state, and in a time when Ger-
many played no such leading part in the world’s
affairs as to swell the bosom of her sons with any
metropolitan pride, such as might have cheered a
French, or English, or once, a Roman or Attic