Historians too often present their personages to the public and to
posterity as actors upon a stage,--I was about to say as puppets in a
show,--whose acts are quite outside of themselves, and whose voices
express emotions not their own. They appear before the footlights of a
fulfilled destiny; and their doubts, their weaknesses, are concealed,
along with their temptations, beneath the paint and stage drapery lent
them by the historian who, knowing beforehand the denouement toward
which their efforts tended, unconsciously assumes a like knowledge on
their part. They are thus often credited with deep-laid motives and
plans which it may perhaps have been impossible for them to entertain at
the time.

To those who lived with them when they were MAKING history, these actors
are all aglow with life. They are animated by its passions, its
impulses. They are urged onward by personal ambition, or held back by
selfish considerations. They are not characters in a drama; they are men
of the world, whose official acts, like those of the men about us
to-day, are influenced by their affections, their family complications,
their prejudices, their rivalries, their avarice, their vanity. The
circumstances of their private life temporarily excite or depress their
energies, and often give them a new and unlooked-for direction; and the
success or failure of their undertakings may be recognized as having
been the result of their individual limitations, of their personal
ignorance of the special conditions with which they were called upon to
cope, or of their short-sightedness.

In this lies the importance of private recollections. The gossip of one
epoch forms part of the history of the next. It is therefore to be
deplored that those whose more or less obscure lives run their course in
the shadow of some public career are seldom sufficiently aware of the