Thronemakers Author:William Roscoe Thayer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GARIBALDI When men look back, two or three hundred years hence, upon the nineteenth century, it may well be that they will discern its salient characteristic ... more »to have been, not scientific, not inventive, as we popularly suppose, but romantic. Science will soon bury our present heaps of facts under larger accumulations, from the summit of which broader theories may be scanned ; to-morrow will make to-day's wonderful invention old-fashioned and insufficient: but the romance with which this later time has been charged will exercise an increasing fascination over poets and novelists and historians, as the years roll on. Oblivion swallows up material achievements, but great deeds never grow old. That many of our writers should not have heard this note of the age argues that they, rather than the age, are prosaic and commonplace. For to what other period shall we turn for a richer store of those vicissitudes and contrasts in fortune which make up the real romance, the profound tragedy, of life ? Everywhere the dissolution of a society rooted in mediaeval traditions is accompanied byconfusion and struggle, — the birth-pangs of a new order. Classes whose separation seemed permanent are thrown together, and antagonistic elements are strangely mixed; there is strife, and doubt, and excess; sudden combinations are suddenly rent by discords; anachronisms flourish side by side with innovations; new institutions wear old names, and old abuses mask in new disguises. In such a crisis, two facts are prominent: the unusual range of activity offered to the individual — may he not traverse the whole scale of experience ? — and the dependence of the individual upon himself. He rises, or he falls, by his own motion. The privileges of caste avail nothing; for the very confusion produces a certain w...« less