Even that German-silver kind of fame, Notoriety, can scarcely be had here at a cheaper rate than a murder done in broad daylight of a Sunday; and the only sure way of having one’s name known to the utmost corners of our empire is by achieving a continental disrepute.  With a metropolis planted in a crevice between Maryland and Virginia, and stunted because its roots vainly seek healthy nourishment in a soil impoverished by slavery, a paulopost future capital, the centre of nothing, without literature, art, or so much as commerce,—­we have no recognized dispenser of national reputations like London or Paris.  In a country richer in humor, and among a people keener in the sense of it than any other, we cannot produce a national satire or caricature, because there is no butt visible to all parts of the country at once.  How many men at this moment know the names, much more the history or personal appearance, of our cabinet ministers?  But the joke of London or Paris tickles all the ribs of England or France, and the intellectual rushlight of those cities becomes a beacon, set upon such bushels, and multiplied by the many-faced provincial reflector behind it.  Meanwhile New York and Boston wrangle about literary and social preeminence like two schoolboys, each claiming to have something (he knows not exactly what) vastly finer than the other at home.  Let us hope that we shall by-and-by develop a rivalry like that of the Italian cities, and that the difficulty of fame beyond our own village may make us more content with doing than desirous of the name of it.  For, after all, History herself is for the most part but the Muse of Little Peddlington, and Athens raised the heaviest crop of laurels yet recorded on a few acres of rock, without help from newspaper guano.

Theophilus Parsons was one of those men of whom surviving contemporaries always say that he was the most gifted person they had ever known, while yet they are able to produce but little tangible evidence of his superiority.  It is, no doubt, true that Memory’s geese are always swans; but in the case of a man like Parsons, where the testimony is so various and concurrent, we cannot help believing that there must have been a special force of character, a marked alertness and grasp of mind, to justify the impression he left behind.  With the exception of John Adams, he was probably the most considerable man of his generation in Massachusetts; and it is not merely the caruit quia vate sacro, but the narrowness of his sphere of action, still further narrowed by the technical nature of a profession in itself provincial, as compared with many other fields for the display of intellectual power, that has hindered him from receiving an amount of fame at all commensurate with an ability so real and so various.