YOUNG MEN IN HISTORY. HISTORY is an imperfect record of nations and races, diverse in their position and capacities, but identical in nature and one in destiny. Viewed comprehensively, its individuals and events comprise the incidents of an uncompleted biography of man, a biography long, obscure, full of puzzling facts for thought to interpret, and more puzzling breaks for thought to bridge, but, on the whole, exhibiting man as moving and man as moving forward. If we scrutinize the character of this progress, we shall find that the forces which propel society in the direction of improvement, and the ideas we form of the nature of that improvement, are the forces and the ideas of youth. The world, indeed, moves under the impulses of youth to realize the ideals of youth. It has youth for its beginning and youth for its end; for youth is alive, and progress is but the movement of life to attain fuller, higher, and more vivid life. Youth, too, is nearer to those celestial fountains of existence whence inspiration pours into the heart and - light streams into the brain. Indeed, all the qualities which constitute the life of the soul, and which preserve in vigor and health even the practical faculties of the mind, freshness, ardor, generosity, love, hope, faith, courage, cheer, all these youth feels stirring and burning in its own breast, and aches to see fulfilled in the common experience of the race. But in age these fine raptures are apt to be ridiculed as the amiable follies of juvenile illusions. In parting, however, with what it derides as illusions, does not age part with the whole of joy and by far the most important element of wisdom? The world it so sagaciously aims to inaugurate, what is it but a stationary and decrepit world,a world which would soon decay, and drop into the abyss of nothingness, were it not for the rejuvenating vitality poured into it by the youth it cynically despises? True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms its withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it makes experience serve aspiration, and knowledge illumine the difficult paths through which thoughts thread their way into facts,it is only then that age becomes broadly and nobly wise. If we thus discern in the sentiments and faculties of youth the animating and impelling soul of historical events,― if, wherever in history we mark a great movement of humanity, we commonly detect a young man at its head or at its heart, we must still, I admit, discriminate between youth and young men, between the genial action of youthful qualities and the imperfections and perversions of youthful character. Youth we commonly represent under the image of morn,- clear, fresh, cheerful, radiant, the green sward trembling and gleaming with ecstasy as the rising sun transfigures its dew-drops into diamonds; but then morn is sometimes black with clouds, and foul with vapors, and terrible with tempests. In treating, therefore, of the position and influence of young men in history, let us begin with those in whom the energies of youth were early perverted from their appropriate objects, and fell under the dominion of sensual appetites or malignant pas sions. And first, it is important we should bear in mind, that, in this misdirection of youth, all that constitutes the spirit, the power, the charm of youth is extinguished. The young man becomes prematurely old. We have all witnessed that saddest of spectacles, the petulant child developing into the ruffian boy, and hurrying into the ruffian man, rude, hard-natured, swaggering, and self-willed, a darkness over his conscience, a glare over his appetites, insensible to duty or affec tion, and only tamed into decencies, by the chains of restraint which an outraged community binds on his impulses. Now give this young savage arbitrary power, let him inherit the empire of the world, remove all restraints on his will, and allow him to riot in the mad caprices of sensuality and malevolence, and he makes his ominous appearance in history as a Caligula, a Domitian, a Nero. More fit for a madhouse than a throne, his advent is the signal of a despotism controlled by no guiding principles, but given over to that spirit of freak and mischief which springs from the union of the boy's brain with the man's appetites; and his fate is to have that craze of the faculties and delirium of the sensations which he calls his life abruptly closed by suicide or assassination: by suicide, when he has become intolerable to himself; by assassination, when, as is more common, he has become intolerable to the world. Evil, however, as history shows him, it must still be said that his career does not exhibit the consistent depravity and systematic wickedness which characterize some of the Roman Emperors of maturer years; and even the giddy ferocities of the youthful Nero can be contemplated with less horror than the Satanic depth of malignity which morosely brooded over shadowy plans of gigantic crime in the dark spirit of the aged Tiberius. This ruffian type of the young man is rarely exhibited on the historical theatre in its full combination of animal fury with mental feebleness. In most young men who acquire prominence in the history of the world there is some genius, however dashed it may be with depravity; and genius is itself an inlet of youth, checks the downward drag of the spiritual into the animal nature, intensifies appetites into passions, and lends impetus to daring ambition, if it does not always purify the motives which prompt its exercise. This genius divorced from wisdom, scornful of moral obligations, and ravenous for notoriety, is especially marked by wilfulness, presumptuous self-assertion, the curse and plague-spot of the perverted soul. Alcibiades in politics and Byron in literature are among its most conspicuous examples. Their defiance of rule was not the confident daring which comes from the vision of genius, but the disdainful audacity which springs from its wilfulness. Alcibiades, a name closely connected with the events which resulted in the ruin of the Athenian empire, was perhaps the most variously accomplished of all those young men of genius who have squandered their genius in the attempt to make it insolently dominant over justice and reason. Graceful, beautiful, brave, eloquent, and affluent, the pupil of Socrates, the darling of the Athenian democracy, lav |