GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS SIR PHILIP SIDNEY [Lecture by George W. Curtis, author, essayist, platform orator (born in Providence, R. I., February 24, 1824; died in Staten Island, New York, August 31, 1892), delivered originally in the Mercantile Library course in Boston, December 9, 1857, and repeatedly given in succeeding seasons on many platforms East and West. This was the third in Mr. Curtis' long list of lyceum lectures, and one of the most popular. He was early called an ideal platform orator. He entered the lecture field in 1853, upon his return from long absence abroad, stepping in among "the giants of those days" then occupying it; and, as John White Chadwick has said, "it was not long before his place among them was clearly defined and perfectly assured. He was the most pleasing, the most gracious, the most serene and musical of the goodly fellowship. As time went on he became one of the most serious and impressive."] LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-Wearied of the world and saddened by the ruin of his fortunes, the Italian Count Maddalo turned from the street, which rang with tales of disaster and swarmed with melancholy faces, into his palace. Perplexed and anxious, he passed through the stately rooms in which hung the portraits of generations of ancestors. The day was hot; his blood was feverish, but the pictures seemed to him cool and remote in a holy calm. He looked at them earnestly; he remembered the long history of which his fathers were parts, he recalled their valor and their patience, and asked himself whether, after all, their manhood was not their patent of nobility; and stretching out his hands towards them, exclaimed: "Let me feel that I am indeed your son by sharing that manhood which made you noble." We Americans laugh at ancestors; and if the best of Copyright, 1894, by Harner & Brothers. From "Literary and Social Essays." By George William Curtis. Published by Harper & Brothers. them came back again, we should be as likely to laugh at his wig as listen to his wisdom. And in our evanescent houses and uneasy life we would no more have ancient ranges of family pictures than Arabs in their tents. Yet we are constantly building and visiting the greater portrait gallery of all in the histories we write and read; and the hour is never lost which we give to it. It may teach a maid humility to know that her mother was fairer. It may make a youth more modest to know that his grandsire was braver. For if the pictures of history show us that deformity is as old as grace, and that virtue was always martyred, they also show that crime, however prosperous for a time, is at last disastrous, and that there can be no permanent peace without justice and freedom. Those pictures teach us also that character is inherited like name and treasure, and that all of us may have famous or infamous ancestors perhaps without knowing it. The melancholy poet, eating his own heart out in a city garret, is the child of Tasso. Grinding Ralph Nickleby, the usurer, is Shylock's grandson. The unjust judge, who declares that some men have no rights which others are bound to respect, is a later Jeffries on his bloody assizes, or dooming Algernon Sidney to the block once more for loving liberty; while he whose dull heart among the new duties of another time is never quickened with public spirit, and who as a citizen aims only at his own selfish advantage, is a later Benedict Arnold whom every generous heart despises. From this lineage of character arises this great convenience that as it is bad manners to criticise our neighbors by name, we may hit them many a sly rap over the shoulders of their ancestors who wore turbans, or helmets, or bagwigs, and lived long ago in other countries. The Church especially finds great comfort in this resource, and the backs of the whole Hebrew race must be sore with the scorings they get for the sins of Christian congregations. The timid Peter, the foolish Virgins, the wicked Herod, are pilloried every Sunday in the pulpit, to the great satisfaction of the Peters, Virgins, and Herods dozing in the pews. But when some ardent preacher heading out of his metaphors, and jumping from Judea and the first century into the United States |