History itself is best studied in biography. Indeed, history is
biography--collective humanity as influenced and governed by
individual men. "What is all history," says Emerson, "but the
work of ideas, a record of the incomparable energy which his
infinite aspirations infuse into man?" In its pages it is always
persons we see more than principles. Historical events are
interesting to us mainly in connection with the feelings, the
sufferings, and interests of those by whom they are accomplished.
In history we are surrounded by men long dead, but whose speech
and whose deeds survive. We almost catch the sound of their
voices; and what they did constitutes the interest of history. We
never feel personally interested in masses of men; but we feel and
sympathise with the individual actors, whose biographies afford
the finest and most real touches in all great historical dramas.
Among the great writers of the past, probably the two that have
been most influential in forming the characters of great men of
action and great men of thought, have been Plutarch and Montaigne
--the one by presenting heroic models for imitation, the other by
probing questions of constant recurrence in which the human mind
in all ages has taken the deepest interest. And the works of both
are for the most part cast in a biographic form, their most
striking illustrations consisting in the exhibitions of character
and experience which they contain.
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