Our tendency to assume individual mark as the measure of personality is flattered by many of the books we read.  It is, of course, easier to depict character, when it is accompanied by some striking individual hue; and therefore in romances and novels this is conferred upon all the forcible characters, merely to favor the author’s hand:  as microscopists feed minute creatures with colored food to make their circulations visible.  It is only the great master who can represent a powerful personality in the purest state, that is, with the maximum of character and the minimum of individual distinction; while small artists, with a feeble hold upon character, habitually resort to extreme quaintnesses and singularities of circumstance, in order to confer upon their weak portraitures some vigor of outline.  It takes a Giotto to draw readily a nearly perfect O; but a nearly perfect triangle any one can draw.  Shakspeare is able to delineate a Gentleman,—­one, that is, who, while nobly and profoundly a man, is so delicately individualized, that the impression of him, however vigorous and commanding, cannot be harsh:  Shakspeare is equal to this task, but even so very able a painter as Fielding is not.  His Squire Western and Parson Adams are exquisite, his Allworthy is vapid:  deny him strong pigments of individualism, and he is unable to portray strong character.  Scott, among British novelists, is, perhaps, in this respect most Shakspearian, though the Colonel Esmond of Thackeray is not to be forgotten; but even Scott’s Dandie Dinmonts, or gentlemen in the rough, sparkle better than his polished diamonds.  Yet in this respect the Waverley Novels are singularly and admirably healthful, comparing to infinite advantage with the rank and file of novels, wherein the “characters” are but bundles of quaintnesses, and the action is impossible.

Written history has somewhat of the same infirmity with fictitious literature, though not always by the fault of the historian.  Far too little can it tell us respecting those of whom we desire to know much; while, on the other hand, it is often extremely liberal of information concerning those of whom we desire to know nothing.  The greatest of men approach a pure personality, a pure representation of man’s imperishable nature; individual peculiarity they far less abound in; and what they do possess is held in transparent solution by their manhood, as a certain amount of vapor is always held by the air.  The higher its temperature, the more moisture can the atmosphere thus absorb, exhibiting it not as cloud, but only as immortal azure of sky:  and so the greater intensity there is of the pure quality of man, the more of individual peculiarity can it master and transform into a simple heavenliness of beauty, of which the world finds few words to say.  Men, in general, have, perhaps, no more genius than novelists in general,—­though it seems a hard speech to make,—­and while profoundly impressed by any manifestation of the pure genius of man, can