Now, if so much of the interest of the French Revolution depends on our minute knowledge of each passing incident, how much more necessary is such knowledge when we are dealing with the quiet nooks and corners of history—when we are seeking an introduction, let us say, into the literary society of Johnson or the fashionable society of Walpole! Society, dead or alive, can have no charm without intimacy, and no intimacy without interest in trifles.
If we would feel at our ease in any company, if we wish to find humour in its jokes and point in its repartees, we must know something of the beliefs and prejudices of its various members—their loves and their hates, their hopes and their fears, their maladies, their marriages, and their flirtations. If these things are beneath our notice, we shall not be the less qualified to serve our queen and country, but need make no attempt to extract pleasure out of one of the most delightful departments of literature.
EULOGY OF GENERAL GRANT
Dean Farrar
Every true man derives his patent of nobleness direct from God. Did not God choose David from the sheepfolds to make him ruler of his people Israel? Was not the “Lord of life and all the worlds” for thirty years a carpenter at Nazareth? Do not such careers illustrate the prophecy of Solomon, “Seest thou the man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings.” When Abraham Lincoln sat, book in hand, day after day, under the tree, moving around it as the shadow moved, absorbed in mastering his task; when James Garfield rang the bell of Hiram Institute, day after day, on the very stroke of the hour, and swept the school room as faithfully as he mastered the Greek lesson; when Ulysses Grant, sent with his team to meet some men who were to load the cart with logs, and finding no men there, loaded the cart with his own boy strength—they showed in conscientious duty and thoroughness the qualities which were to raise them to rule the destinies of men.
But the youth was not destined to die in that deep valley of obscurity and toil in which it is the lot—perhaps the happy lot—of many of us to spend our little lives. The hour came: the man was needed.
In 1861 there broke out the most terrible war of modern days. Grant received a commission as colonel of volunteers, and in four years the struggling toiler had risen to the chief command of a vaster army than has ever been handled by any mortal man. Who could have imagined that four years could make that stupendous difference? But it is often so. The great men needed for some tremendous crisis have often stepped as it were through the door in the wall which no one had noticed, and, unannounced, unheralded, without prestige, have made their way silently and single-handed to the front.
And there was no luck in it. He rose, it has been said, by the upward gravitation of natural fitness. It was the work of inflexible faithfulness, of indomitable resolution, of sleepless energy, of iron purpose, of persistent tenacity. In battle after battle, in siege after siege, whatever Grant had to do he did it with his might. He undertook, as General Sherman said, what no one else would have adventured, till his very soldiers began to reflect some of his own indomitable determination. With a patience which nothing could tire, with a firmness which no obstacle could daunt, with a military genius which embraced the vastest plans, yet attended to the smallest minutiæ, he defeated one after another every great general of the Confederates except General Stonewall Jackson.
Grant had not only to defeat armies, but to “annihilate resources”—to leave no choice but destruction or submission. He saw that the brief ravage of the hurricane is infinitely less ruinous than the interminable malignity of the pestilence, and that in that colossal struggle victory—swift, decisive, overwhelming, at all costs—was the truest mercy. In silence, in determination, in clearness of insight, he was your Washington and our Wellington. He was like them also in this, that the word “can’t” did not exist in his soldier’s dictionary, and that all he achieved was accomplished without bluster and without parade.
After the surrender at Appomattox the war of the Secession was over. It was a mighty work, and Grant had done it mightily. Surely the light of God, which manifests all things in the slow history of their ripening, has shown that for the future destinies of a mighty nation it was a necessary and a blessed work. The Church hurls her most indignant anathema at unrighteous war, but she never refused to honor the faithful soldier who fights in the cause of his country and his God. The gentlest and most Christian of poets has used the tremendous words that—