INTRODUCTION

"Great men exist that there may be greater men."-EMERSON

REAT men are those who raise their heads above the multitude, not because they are different from other men, but because they have in a greater degree what is common to all. The world of men is like a sea of swimmers, in which only a few can keep their heads up to be seen and known, the rest sink and are forgotten in a common mediocrity.

"As rich as Croesus" is a proverb. Few think of how precariously he held his vast possessions. Of him we are told that, defeated by Cyrus, the Persian king, he was about to be burned to death, when on the funeral pyre in the anguish of his heart he cried, "Solon! Solon! Solon!" and to Cyrus, inquiring what he meant, he related how, years before, Solon, the philosopher, had said to him, when he thought that he might rightly be called the happiest of mankind, "No; happiness belongs rather with poverty and virtue," and that Cyrus, struck by the

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remark, forbade his execution and made him his friend until his dying day. It is a pretty story, containing a wise philosophy of life and an example of a generous heart.

There are required for the hero the lofty spirit and the high endeavor. A man can not be called great who is hailed as such by the trumped-up applause of the unthinking multitude. How many such names the advancing years have obliterated as the sun burns off the seed sown in the scant soil of the rock, where no nourishment can give it vitality.

A name and nothing else!

No one who desires to know about the great men who have lived in the world can afford to be ignorant of the life of Julius Cæsar the Roman, whom Shakespeare called "the foremost man of all the world." Plutarch, the historian, wrote of him in his simple, charming way as he wrote of many another ancient monarch or distinguished man. Emerson said: "We can not read Plutarch without a tingling of the blood." His writings have been the nursery of great men for centuries.

In order to keep the names of distinguished men alive, cities, temples and monuments have been built and all have perished. Their names have been forgotten. But the names of the great are kept living in

the hearts and minds of men, in books which are the true monuments of heroes.

The imagination is stirred by the alarm felt by the Greeks because of the threatened Persian invasion. The Greeks in that perilous time stood for the refinements of civilization. It would have been an irreparable loss had they yielded. They were a feeble folk, but they withstood the advancing hosts of the Persians, a million of men, with great patriotic ardor. Marathon and Salamis are names to stir the blood to-day. "Some things," says Froude, "and some persons deserve to be commemorated eternally."

Great occasions have inspired the pens of men to the putting forth of great works in the realm of literature. Many a poet who could not wield the sword has written with the pen in glowing, stirring words, in verses like trumpet sounds, to quicken the pulses, like painted pictures which make the old scenes live again. While men do brave and noble deeds the historians and biographers and poets are makers of their fame; especially the poets whose very name in the original Greek is maker. To these men, who have done in order that we may do, we owe a debt of gratitude. By their endeavors we are inspirited, by their zeal our hearts burn, by the splendor of their successes our lives shine as by reflected light, and in