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KING PELLINORE’S LITERARY MAGAZINE

Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man
belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of
things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you,
and all men, and all events. Ordinarily, every body in
society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other
person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it
takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so
much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent.
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires
infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish
his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a
train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after
we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of
minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is
confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An
institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as,
Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley;
Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, 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, or 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

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