The one great reason why men are famous is that in one way or another they have come to symbolize traits of an ideal life. Their names are charged with daring, hope, love, power, devotion, beauty, or truth, and we cherish them because human nature is ever striving after these things. It will be hard to find any kind of fame that is wholly lacking in this ideal element. All the known crimes and vices can be found attached to famous names, but there is always something else, some splendid self-confidence, some grandiose project, some faith, passion, or vision, to give them power. It may not be quite true to say, “One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world hath never lost”; but it is certain that there is nothing to which the ear of the world is so sensitive as to such accents, or which, having heard, it is less willing to forget. Every scrap of real inspiration, whether in art or conduct, is treasured up, when once it has been recorded, and is fairly certain to prove _ære perennius_. A great vitality belongs, however, to anything which can bring the ideal down out of its abstractness and make it active and dramatic. A dramatic appeal is an appeal to human nature as a whole, instead of to a specialized intellectual faculty, to plain men as well as educated, and to educated men through that plainer part of them which is, after all, the most fully alive. So men of action have always a first lien on fame, other things being equal—Garibaldi, for example, with his picturesque campaigns, red shirt and childlike personality, over the other heroes of Italian liberation. And next to this comes the advantage of being preserved for us in some form of art which makes the most of any dramatic possibilities a man may have, and often adds to them by invention. Gibbon, Macaulay, Scott, not to speak of Shakespeare, have done much to guide the course of fame for English readers. Perhaps it was this survival of salient personal traits, often trivial or fictitious, that Bacon had in mind when he remarked “for the truth is, that time seemeth to be of the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that which is light and blown up, and drowneth that which is weighty and solid.”[25] But, after all, traits of personality may be as weighty and solid as anything else; and where they are inspiring it is right that they should be immortal. The merely trivial, of this kind, seldom endures except by association with something of real significance. It is noteworthy that what a man did for humanity in the past is not the chief cause of fame, and not sufficient to insure it unless he can keep on doing something in the present. The world has little or no gratitude. If the past contribution is the only thing and there is nothing presently animating in the living idea of a man, it will use the former, without caring where it came from, and forget the latter.