to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves! We might give many
more names, on this same principle. I will remark again, however, as a
fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different _sphere_
constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be
Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of
world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly
great man that could not be _all_ sorts of men. The Poet who could merely
sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much.
He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a
Heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker,
Legislator, Philosopher;--in one or the other degree, he could have been,
he is all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that
great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears
that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and
touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education led
him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great Man;
that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like Austerlitz
Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical men withal;
the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings of
Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there it
lies; no man whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at all without
these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite
well: one can easily believe it; they had done things a little harder than
these! Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have made a still better
Mirabeau. Shakspeare,--one knows not what _he_ could not have made, in the
supreme degree.

True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all great
men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties of
aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far oftenest