Would you laugh?--Cervantes or Rabelais will
laugh with you. Do you grieve?--there is Thomas a Kempis or
Jeremy Taylor to grieve with and console you. Always it is to
books, and the spirits of great men embalmed in them, that we
turn, for entertainment, for instruction and solace--in joy and
in sorrow, as in prosperity and in adversity.
Man himself is, of all things in the world, the most interesting
to man. Whatever relates to human life--its experiences, its
joys, its sufferings, and its achievements--has usually
attractions for him beyond all else. Each man is more or less
interested in all other men as his fellow-creatures--as members
of the great family of humankind; and the larger a man's culture,
the wider is the range of his sympathies in all that affects the
welfare of his race.
Men's interest in each other as individuals manifests itself in a
thousand ways--in the portraits which they paint, in the busts
which they carve, in the narratives which they relate of each
other. "Man," says Emerson, "can paint, or make, or think,
nothing but Man." Most of all is this interest shown in the
fascination which personal history possesses for him. "Man s
sociality of nature," says Carlyle, "evinces itself, in spite of
all that can be said, with abundance of evidence, by this one
fact, were there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes
in Biography.
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