It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is a painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never will be such a being. The best of us is woven of “mingled yarn, good and ill together.” And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and the ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he “contained multitudes” too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects of that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
[Original]
