The accomplishment of a man is the light by which we are enabled to discover the limits of his personality.  Every man brings into the world with him a certain amount of pith and force, and to that pith or force his amount of accomplishment is exactly proportioned.  It is in this way that every spoken word, every action of a man, becomes biographical.  Everything a man says or does is in consistency with himself; and it is by looking back on his sayings and doings that we arrive at the truth concerning him.  A man is one; and every outcome of him has a family resemblance.  Goldsmith did not “write like an angel and talk like poor Poll,” as we may in part discern from Boswell’s “Johnson.”  Strange, indeed, if a man talked continually the sheerest nonsense, and wrote continually the gracefulest humours; if a man was lame on the street, and the finest dancer in the ball-room.  To describe a character by antithesis is like painting a portrait in black and white—­all the curious intermixtures and gradations of colour are lost.  The accomplishment of a human being is measured by his strength, or by his nice tact in using his strength.  The distance to which your gun, whether rifled or smooth-bored, will carry its shot, depends upon the force of its charge.  A runner’s speed and endurance depends upon his depth of chest and elasticity of limb.  If a poet’s lines lack harmony, it instructs us that there is a certain lack of harmony in himself.  We see why Haydon failed as an artist when we read his life.  No one can dip into the “Excursion” without discovering that Wordsworth was devoid of humour, and that he cared more for the narrow Cumberland vale than he did for the big world.  The flavour of opium can be detected in the “Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel.”  A man’s word or deed takes us back to himself, as the sunbeam takes us back to the sun.  It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice.  If you do your fair day’s work, you are certain to get your fair day’s wage—­in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste.  You may have seen at country fairs a machine by which the rustics test their strength of arm.  A country fellow strikes vigorously a buffer, which recoils, and the amount of the recoil—­dependent, of course, on the force with which it is struck—­is represented by a series of notches or marks.  The world is such a buffer.  A man strikes it with all his might; his mark may be 40,000 pounds, a peerage, and Westminster Abbey, a name in literature or art; but in every case his mark is nicely determined by the force or the art with which the buffer is struck.  Into the world a man brings his personality, and his biography is simply a catalogue of its results.