one man; as Monachism, of the hermit Antony;[201] the Reformation, of
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;[202] Methodism, of Wesley;[203] Abolition,
of Clarkson.[204] Scipio,[205] Milton called "the height of Rome"; and
all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few
stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy,
a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But
the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds
to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels
poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, a costly book,
have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem
to say like that, "Who are you, Sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors
for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out
and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to
command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular
fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried
to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed,
and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the
duke, and assured that he had been insane,[206] owes its popularity to
the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the
world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason,
and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination
plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier
vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common
day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total
of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred,[207] and