2. WINSTON CHURCHILL

The tidal wave of historical romance which toward the end of the past
century attacked this coast and broke so far inland as to inundate the
entire continent swept Winston Churchill to a substantial peak of
popularity to which he has since clung, with little apparent loss, by
the exercise of methods somewhat but not greatly less romantic than
those which first lifted him above the flood. He came during a moment
of national expansiveness. Patriotism and jingoism, altruism and
imperialism, passion and sentimentalism shook the temper which had been
slowly stiffening since the Civil War. Now, with a rush of unaccustomed
emotions, the national imagination sought out its own past, luxuriating
in it, not to say wallowing in it.

In Mr. Churchill it found a romancer full of consolation to any who
might fear or suspect that the country's history did not quite match its
destiny. He had enough erudition to lend a very considerable "thickness"
to his scene, whether it was Annapolis or St. Louis or Kentucky or
upland New England. He had a sense for the general bearings of this or
that epoch; he had a firm, warm confidence in the future implied and
adumbrated by this past; he had a feeling for the ceremonial in all
eminent occasions. He had, too, a knack at archaic costume and knack
enough at the idiom in which his contemporaries believed their forebears
had expressed themselves. And he had, besides all these qualities needed
to make his records heroic, the quality of moral earnestness which
imparted to them the look of moral significance. Richard Carvel by the
exercise of simple Maryland virtues rises above the enervate young
sparks of Mayfair; Stephen Brice in _The Crisis_ by his simple Yankee
virtues makes his mark among the St. Louis rebels--who, however, are