Events may have more or less of a personal connection with monarchs, but it would not follow from this that the history which records them is a history alone of kings and statesmen. It is only so far as they and their acts were the representatives of the national heart, and the national thought, that they came down in the national memory, and the national records. The separate ordinary pursuits of men may, in one sense, occupy more of our ordinary thinking, but the other or historic interest we recognize as being of a higher, a more exciting, and even a more absorbing kind, because belonging to us, and felt by us in common with multitudes of other souls. The mechanic or farmer may consult books of a professional or statistical nature, but _as history_ they will be ever unreadable. Even in the workshop and in the field, although the habitual current of his thoughts may be upon what would seem to him the nearest, and therefore the more important concerns of life, these other elements of history will yet have the greater charm, and occupy a higher place both in his feelings and his intelligence. It is what he thinks _with others_ that constitutes the higher life of his being. Hence the tendency of the popular mind, in all ages, to be absorbed in the recital of deeds most remote from the daily associations of ordinary life. Hence the popularity of the rhapsodist, the minstrel, the chronicler, and, in our own age, of the Magazine and the Newspaper. Hence, too, in the more free and popular governments of modern times, the universal devotion to what is called _politics_. Why is the farmer more excited by an election than by the sale of his wheat? Most false as well as unphilosophical is the view which would ascribe this to any calculating patriotism, to any utilitarian vigilance, or to what is commonly called an _enlightened self-interest_. The mechanic thinks more of politics than of his trade; for the same reason that led his ancestor to the crusade or the tournament. Instead of being the offspring of utilitarian views, this _public spirit_ is often most blindly destructive of the _private_ interest, and most directly opposed to all the teachings of that political economy which recognizes its own utilities as alone the true and rational ends of human action. In a much higher sense, too, is all this true, when a religious element enters into the common or catholic feeling.