Ideal Character Research Articles

Five Great Battles of Civilization

Historians have often argued among themselves and at times have taken the people into their confidence with regard to the great battles of history, and so well have they done what they have undertaken, describing and comparing the battle-scenes, fighting over again the great struggles, and explaining the causes and the epoch-making results of Marathon, Philippi, Hastings, Waterloo, Gettysburg, and the rest, that a layman like myself in such historical studies as theirs must not trespass on their territory. For me to trespass there would be to add only one more battlescene to the long list and, while the outcome could hardly be called epoch-making, there can be no doubt at all either as to which side would lose or as to the serious fatalities attending defeat. But in human history there are battle-fields and battle-fields and at no serious risk of encroaching on any expert's preserves I have chosen from history five battles that I know to be great, indeed that I am almost ready to declare the very greatest, and that I think I can show to be in the fullest sense epoch-making. The scenes of these battles I would visit in this essay. Before setting out, since the journey is hardly an ordinary one, being very like a journey in wonderland or at least being in a world the geography of which no geographers known to me have ever mapped or described, I must try to show, at least in a general way, in what sort of a world the various battles of this essay have been fought to their finish. Probably the one word civilizations' will reveal, as in a flash, the world whose battle-fields I would visit; contrary to what many may now infer, however, the world of civilization, although having its peculiar ideal character, is not to be thought of as separate from the world of the geographers; only as bigger, being made so by having spiritual as well as physical values. The spiritual values, not alone, but added to the physical

An Ideal Character to be Realized

An Ideal Character to be Realized

The Development of English Prose from Elizabeth to Victoria

There has been produced up to the present time no complete manual or treatise, exhibiting the origin and development of our prose. The works of Minto and Saintsbury are characterized by marked excellences, but they fail in some points of essential interest and importance. Our standard literary historians ignore, for the most part, this phase of their subject, and there is more of stimulating, suggestive criticism to be gathered from the terse prefaces that accompany Mark Pattison's edition of Pope, than from the elaborate manuals of Morley and Arnold. In discussing the growth of English prose from Elizabeth to Victoria, it is not my purpose to ignore the periods that precede the Elizabethan age. The germ of our English prose antedates by many generations the advent of that era. It may be traced back as early as the epoch of “the blameless King,” Alfred, in whose ideal character were concretely displayed those qualities of mind and heart of which the romancers of the Arthurian cycle but dreamed.