"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.