CONTENTS
I.—A TALK ABOUT BIOGRAPHY
II.—THE BEGINNERS
III.—WASHINGTON TO LINCOLN
IV—LINCOLN AND HIS SUCCESSORS
V—STATESMEN
VI.—PIONEERS
VII.—GREAT SOLDIERS
VIII.—GREAT SAILORS
Sample text taken from ...
CHAPTER I
A TALK ABOUT BIOGRAPHY
No doubt most of you think biography dull reading. You would much
rather sit down with a good story. But have you ever thought what a
story is? It is nothing but a bit of make-believe biography.
Let us see, in the first place, just what biography means. It is formed
from two Greek words, "bios," meaning life, and "graphein," meaning to
write: life-writing. In other words, a biography is the story of the
life of some individual. Now what the novelist does is to write the
biographies of the people of his story; not usually from the cradle to
the grave, but for that crucial period of their careers which marked
some great success or failure; and he tries to make them so life-like
and natural that we will half-believe they are real people, and that the
things he tells about really happened. Sometimes, to accomplish this, he
even takes the place of one of his own characters, and tells the story
in the first person, as Dickens does in "David Copperfield." That is
called autobiography, which is merely a third Greek word, "autos,"
meaning self, added to the others. An automobile, for instance,
is a self-moving vehicle. So autobiography is the biography of oneself.
The great aim of the novelist is, by any means within his power, to make
his tale seem true, and the truer it is—the truer to human nature and
the facts of life—the greater is his triumph.
Sample text taken from ... CHAPTER VIII
GREAT SAILORS
We have said that America has produced no soldier of
commanding genius, but her sailors outrank the world. Even Great
Britain, mighty seafaring nation as she has been, cannot, in the last
hundred and fifty years, show any brighter galaxy of stars. Just why it
would be difficult to say. Perhaps America inherited from England the
traditions of that race of heroes who made the age of Elizabeth, so
memorable on the ocean, and who started their country on her career as
mistress of the seas—Raleigh, Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and
Howard of Effingham.
Surely in direct descent from these daring adventurers was that earliest
of America's naval commanders, John Paul Jones, well called the "Founder
of the American Navy." He it was who first carried the Stars and Stripes
into foreign waters, and who made Europe to see that a new nation had
arisen, in the west. He it was who first scouted the tradition of
England's invincibility on the sea, and carried the war into her very
ports. He it was who proved that American valor yielded no whit to
British valor—who, when Captain Pearson, of the Serapis, asked
if he had struck his colors, shouted back that he had not yet begun
to fight, although his ship had been shot to pieces and was sinking; but
who thereupon did begin, and to such good purpose that he captured his
adversary and got his crew aboard her as his own ship sank. Truly a
remarkable man and one worth looking at closely.
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