Men do not always take an accurate measure of their
contemporaries. The statesman, the general, the monarch of to-day
fills all eyes and ears, though to the next generation he may be
as if he had never been. "And who is king to-day?" the painter
Greuze would ask of his daughter, during the throes of the first
French Revolution, when men, great for the time, were suddenly
thrown to the surface, and as suddenly dropt out of sight again,
never to reappear. "And who is king to-day? After all," Greuze
would add, "Citizen Homer and Citizen Raphael will outlive those
great citizens of ours, whose names I have never before heard of."
Yet of the personal history of Homer nothing is known, and of
Raphael comparatively little. Even Plutarch, who wrote the lives
of others: so well, has no biography, none of the eminent Roman
writers who were his contemporaries having so much as mentioned
his name. And so of Correggio, who delineated the features of
others so well, there is not known to exist an authentic portrait.
There have been men who greatly influenced the life of their
time, whose reputation has been much greater with posterity
than it was with their contemporaries. Of Wickliffe, the
patriarch of the Reformation, our knowledge is extremely small.
He was but as a voice crying in the wilderness. We do not
really know who was the author of 'The Imitation of Christ'
--a book that has had an immense circulation, and exercised
a vast religious influence in all Christian countries.
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