This is the revenge of the bards: from singing of godlike men they come to feel themselves godlike; and in time they persuade a respectable portion of the community to take them at their own value. Now it is their turn to share—almost to usurp—the glory of the kings and warriors their former patrons. Homer takes as high a rank as Agamemnon and Achilles and Ulysses, who are remembered because Homer admitted them to his narrative. The bard establishes the canon of the memorable. May there not have been other men as wise as Moses or as patient as Job or as strong as Samson? There may have been, but as they lacked bards they dropped out of the race for perennial honor. That race, at least, is not for the swift alone. Socrates had a better bard than Pericles; he had Plato. Caesar had a better bard than Pompey: he had himself. If there were more Caesars, history might be different; certainly historiography would be. As it is, accident and art play an enormous part in fixing human fame. The process continues to the present day, for the biographer who has succeeded to the bard has the bard’s habits in no very different degree. But he is no longer quite so dependent as his ancestor, no longer quite so official. Like will to like in biography as elsewhere. So long as the craft of making reputations is left to the guild of letters, so long will the guild impress it with its special prejudices. It will choose to write about those great men whose careers best conform to some classic type or fit some dramatic mode or flatter some literary sentiment. A great man who has been a conspicuous patron of the arts has ten times the chances at posterity that a mere man of power or money has; but so has a great man who has been eloquent or who has borne himself like Cato or who has had a fate in some way or other resembling Napoleon’s. Not only does the literary guild choose men of action on literary grounds to write about: it chooses disproportionately to write about its members. There are as many lives of thinkers and artists as of generals and monarchs. Philostratus wrote about the sophists and Eunapius and Diogenes Laertius about the philosophers and Suetonius about the grammarians; in the Middle Ages monks wrote particularly about monks who succeeded in their business and turned saints; Vasari in the Renaissance said less about even the princes who encouraged painters than about the painters themselves; Boswell chose not Burke nor Chatham but Johnson to stand as the centre of his society; Goethe’s Duke survives primarily in the various lives of Goethe; how many passionate, beautiful books there are about Poe and Keats and Byron and Heine and Hugo and Pushkin and Leopardi!