Boreham on Monuments

Instinct Toward Stone
In an editorial entitled, ‘When ages talk to ages’, Dr F W Boreham remarked on the way sorrowing people turn instinctively towards erecting masses of stone, an impulse “born of the conviction that goodness is too precious a thing to be permitted to perish”.[1] The stonemasons who may have quarried and engraved centuries ago, have made “silent stones articulate” in that “every stone ... takes to itself a Voice, and every Voice is an ascription, a litany, a prayer”.[2]

Mystical Monuments
Boreham said that the desire to visit such stones was as mystical and as wonderful as the decision to commission and erect the monuments. Embracing Montaigne’s view that “of all human passions, there is none so persistent and characteristic as our passion for bridging chasm and for linking things up”, Boreham believed that the significance of monuments lay in their expression of the human “craving to get in touch with the great tracts of time”.[3]

Pilgrim to Sacred Sites
Counting himself as a pilgrim to many sacred sites,[4] Boreham wrote that such visitors delude themselves into thinking that they are merely bringing their tribute of honor and affection but in reality they receive far more than they bring. He elaborated: “For, from the hour of their visit to the tomb, the distinguished person who sleeps there becomes a more commanding presence in their lives. They have forged a new and singularly effective link with the life that he lived and the work that he did. Henceforth he is to them not merely a name; he is a throbbing personality; a potent force in all their experience and achievement”.[5]

Gratitude to Heroes
Boreham was appreciative of the large number of heroic statues that had been erected in the twenty-five years prior to the First World War and he was supportive of the energetic promotion of monuments in the interwar period. He did not, however, remark on the decline in the commissioning of monuments (especially following the Second World War), the change in the focus of monuments from glorifying the person to celebrating the deed and the shift in terminology from ‘monument’ (with its association with glorification) to ‘memorial’ and ‘shrine’ (which emphasized communal mourning).[6]

Imbibing the Spirit
While many modern Australian historians have been skeptical about the power of shrines and relics to help people commune with the dead,[7] Les Carlyon writes of the thousands of Australians (15,000 in the year 2000) who visit Gallipoli (‘Australia’s largest memorial’) each year to imbibe the Anzac spirit and ‘discover their past’.[8]

Geoff Pound

Image: Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance.

[1] Boreham, Mercury, 5 July 1952.
[2] Boreham, Mercury, 5 July 1952.
[3] Boreham, Mercury, 8 February 1930.
[4] Boreham, When the swans fly high, 157.
[5] Boreham, Mercury, 8 April 1933.
[6] These changes in public consciousness and the building of monuments are extensively detailed in Ken S Inglis, Sacred places: War memorials in the Australian landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998) and are briefly sketched in Davison, The use and misuse of Australian history, 37-55.
[7] Davison, The use and misuse of Australian history, 138.
[8] Carlyon, Gallipoli, 8-10, 534.

New Boreham Book

Michael Dalton and I thought readers of the Official F W Boreham Web Site might appreciate seeing a preview of the cover of the forthcoming book, Lover of Life: F W Boreham’s Tribute to His Mentor.

J J Doke’s photograph appears in the centre of the cover amid an autumn scene. This is fitting as Doke was a lover of nature and, according to FWB, was rarely seen without a camera in his hand.

Michael and I are very grateful to Laura Zugzda for her skilful and creative work on this cover design.

Do keep sending us your names and contact details if you are interested in getting a copy of this book when it comes off the printing press or simply to be kept informed. We would hate you to miss out on a first edition.

We are already incurring publishing costs and would appreciate any donations you are able to send us.

Further details about notifying us can be found on the F W Boreham Book on Mentoring web site.

Geoff Pound

Image: Front Cover of Lover of Life.

Boreham on Keeping a Journal

Diligent Diarists
F W Boreham carefully noted the diligence of people like Henry Livingstone and Captain Robert Falcon Scott who kept their diaries to the end of their days, especially under trying conditions, and remarked, “Few things are more touching or more significant than the concern that dying men display, under certain conditions, to keep their journals intact to the last”.[1] Beyond the value of a diary recording important times and events, Boreham affirmed the personal benefit of ‘reliving’ events in which “the keeping of a diary is a species of self-communing; the self of Today talking to the same self of Tomorrow”.[2]

Like Bees in Amber
F W Boreham recognized that diaries might bring benefits not only to the diarist but to the diary’s readers: “Like bees in amber, the thoughts, feelings and impressions of Today are made available to the eyes of Tomorrow”. In this way people may continue their contact with the world they left behind but their diaries enabled them to “say their say to the Ages”.[3]

Long Term Investment
Frank Boreham loved Emerson’s image of a diary being like a bank in which valuable experiences could be saved and drawn upon for future guidance.[4] Implicit was the thought that a diary can accrue value to life’s experiences as the maturity of age and the wisdom of hindsight enabled readers to reap further dividends from the events of the past. Boreham viewed diaries as a personal savings bank for the diarist and recognized the riches they could offer to others, when he observed: “Among all her priceless archives, the Church has no documents comparable in value with personal outpourings of this intimate kind. She treasures as above all price the Confessions of St Augustine, the Breviary of St Teresa, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, Newton’s Autobiography and the self-revealing journals of men like David Brainerd and John Woolman”.[5]

Boreham the Diarist
Some of the earliest attempts by Boreham at journaling included his travelogues entitled, From England to Mosgiel, N.Z. by Frank William Boreham[6] (published in five installments in the British Courier newspaper) and Loose leaves: From the journal of my voyage round the world (published by the Taieri advocate and H H Driver). These represented a selection of experiences that Boreham culled from the personal diaries that he meticulously kept. While he extolled the virtues of keeping a diary, only eight of his annual diaries are extant and these record only the final years of his life.[7]

Geoff Pound

Image: 'Like bees in amber..' (this is a bee in a beautiful amber bracelet. You'd get a real buzz out of wearing this).


[1] F W Boreham, The last milestone (London: The Epworth Press, 1961), 43.
[2] Boreham, The last milestone, 43.
[3] Boreham, The last milestone, 43.
[4] Boreham, Mercury, 7 January 1928.
[5] Boreham, The last milestone, 43.
[6] F W Boreham, ‘From England to Mosgiel, N.Z., Five letters to the editor of the Courier’, Courier, 6 and 21 March, 1895.
[7] The diaries relate to the years 1946, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1956, 1958 and 1959. When Boreham died, many of his books (including these diaries) were gathered up by the Rev Sir Irving Benson. Boreham’s diaries and two letters were deposited with Benson’s papers in the State Library of Victoria (Ref. No. MS 11508 Boreham, Rev Dr F).

Boreham on Autobiographies

Write Your Story
While F W Boreham wrote about the fundamental distinctions between biography and autobiography (and reckoned that “all literature divides itself into these two classes”), he encouraged all people to write down their story because of the value of preserving and passing on the inspiration and lessons of one’s experience.[1] Challenging his readers to consider what they were bequeathing, Boreham expressed his verdict in stating, “Experience—the most priceless hoard that living creatures ever amass—is bequeathed as a heritage from generation to generation”.[2]

My Pilgrimage
In 1935, at the age of sixty-four, Boreham informed his readers, with a touch of humor, that he would be doing what he had suggested that others might do before they die. He said, “I am firmly resolved, on attaining centenarian honors, to give up writing essays, idylls, sketches, and all that kind of nonsense, and to devote my powers, before they begin to decay, to the compilation of my autobiography”.[3]

Within five years Boreham had written and published his autobiography, which he clarified, was not “born of an inflated conception of my own importance. On the contrary, it is born of a delicious consciousness of my own insignificance”.[4] In perhaps his strongest claim for ordinary people leaving their story for others, Boreham continued: “The lives of the Nobodies and the Nonentities offer a virgin field of novelty and freshness .… There is no drama like the drama of reality; no lure like the lure of life; no business half as intriguing as other people’s business. The man whose biography is not worth writing has never yet been born”.[5]

Geoff Pound

Image: 'write down your own story...'

[1] F W Boreham, Ships of pearl (London: The Epworth Press 1935), 38.
[2] Boreham, Mercury, 4 January 1936.
[3] Boreham, Ships of pearl, 34.
[4] F W Boreham, My pilgrimage (London: The Epworth Press, 1940) 7-8.
[5] Boreham, My pilgrimage, 7-8.

Boreham on Biographies

No History, Only Biography
F W Boreham possessed a bias towards Disraeli’s decree, “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory”[1] and Emerson’s variation, “There is properly no history; only biography”.[2] Boreham wrote of the means by which readers might experience the personalities of significant people who had died and asserted, “The biographies of the noble dead are among the most stimulating volumes in our libraries. By means of their pages we come in touch with the richest and rarest spirits of the past: and in the process, our finest impulses are quickened and our highest aspirations inflamed”.[3]

Return to Biography
F W Boreham remarked in 1912 that there were indications that there was a return to the reading of biographies, a trend that he applauded and explained was due to a protest against modern fiction and a return to real life.[4] In this editorial entitled, ‘The return to biography’, Boreham explained how the functions of historian and biographer were quite distinct, yet renewed his appeal for the element of human interest in biography as he had with the writing of history: “Happily, the biographer is coming to recognise that real life is never prosy or dull, and that the man who produces a dull or prosy book has but proclaimed his failure as a biographer”.[5]

Remembering Unsung Heroes
F W Boreham not only wrote many biographical editorials about heroes who dazzled with their brilliance but also selected “minor” characters, “second-rate poets”,[6] “first mates”[7] and “makeweights”,[8] to encourage his readers to see the best in lives that were mediocre or flawed. Valuing the stories of superstars as well as the unsung heroes, Boreham paid tribute to ‘the romance of obscurity’, saying: “If the life of the man in the street is capable of artistic and attractive biographical treatment, how much more so is the life of the man who moved the millions, discovered the poles or saved his country in the day of crisis. If the life of the ordinary man is a nugget of romance, what a literary goldmine the life of the extraordinary man should prove”![9]

Geoff Pound

Image: FWB wrote a biography on this man, George Augustus Selwyn. It is hard to pick up a copy of this book. If you do you will be paying at least $US500.00!! It is because of such ridiculous prices that John Broadbanks Publishing has been formed.

[1] Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming: An autobiography (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1870), 34.
[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘History’, The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson comprising his essays, lectures, poems, and orations vol. 1 (London: Bell and Daldy, 1866), 4.
[3] Boreham, Mercury, 8 April 1933.
[4] Boreham, Mercury, 5 October 1912.
[5] Boreham, Mercury, 5 October 1912.
[6] Boreham, Mercury, 8 August 1953.
[7] Boreham, Mercury, 13 August 1949.
[8] Boreham, Mercury, 28 September 1946.
[9] Boreham, Mercury, 9 December 1933.

Boreham on Books as Literary Monuments

Worth of the Bookworm
Of all the repositories of history, F W Boreham believed that books have been the most valuable in dispelling the ignorance that has blocked the path of progress. In an editorial in which Boreham made this point and advocated the worth of ‘the bookworm’, he spelt out the uses of books and why their reading was superior to other ways of ‘encountering’ the author. He explained:

“But by means of books, the ordinary mind establishes direct contact with the master-mind. People love to visit the scenes amid which Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Dickens once moved. They feel that, in paying pilgrimage to Stratford and Grasmere and Gads Hill, they are getting in touch with these deathless saints. But the sentiment is ephemeral compared with the real contact established with these commanding personalities when, taking into our hands the books that they themselves actually wrote, we allow them to pour into our minds the opulent treasures of their own. It is not simply that we imbibe their ideas and are infected by their philosophy. We come into personal touch with themselves and bear the impress of their magnetic personalities for ever afterwards.”[1]

Citizens of the Ages
Boreham continued to assert the supremacy of books by imagining playfully that even if Shakespeare were still alive, interviews would be difficult to secure and even if successful, interviewers would find the conversation degenerating into “a handful of platitudes and commonplaces”. Not only did Boreham consider that the reading of books was the most effective way to benefit from the personalities of the authors but also he concurred with Macaulay’s assertion that “the invention of printing was the most notable event that took place during a thousand years of history”.[2] The invention of the printing press enabled people to become “citizens of all ages” as they availed themselves of the increasing number of books that were published.[3]

Geoff Pound

Image: Literary monuments


[1] Boreham, Mercury, 31 August 1940.
[2] Boreham, Mercury, 25 November 1922.
[3] Boreham, Mercury, 6 September 1941; Age, 25 October 1941.

Boreham on Communing With History's Figures

Encountering People
F W Boreham believed that good history writing should not only inspire people to good living as they read the stories of great people but also change readers through the direct encounter with history’s subjects.

This idea is expressed by romantic historians such as George Bancroft who wrote of “communing with antiquity”.[1] Thomas Carlyle affirmed Walter Scott’s contribution in reinterpreting the notion of ‘experience’ through reading when he said: “[History’s] faint hearsays of ‘philosophy by experience’ will have to exchange themselves everywhere for direct inspection and embodiment: this, and this only, will be counted as experience; and till once experience has got in, philosophy will reconcile herself to wait at the door. It is a great service, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by him”.[2]

Bringing People to Life
This goal of leading readers into the experience of ‘direct inspection and embodiment’ with people who were alive in history’s pages in turn influenced Boreham who sought to recreate scenes with imagination to heighten the power of the experience.

Boreham practised what he preached. Through the reading of books and visiting graves and other memorials he engaged in a deep communion with the subject.

Geoff Pound

Image: Grave of John Bunyan (one of FWB's favourite authors). Whenever in London, Frank Boreham would visit Bunyan's grave at Bunhill Fields Cemetery.


[1]George Bancroft, ‘Letter to Andrews Norton’, January 9, 1819, Bancroft papers (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society), 1819.
[2] Thomas Carlyle, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, Essays, 3 Thomas Carlyle’s collected works vol. V (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), 275.

Boreham on the Need for Heroes

People Need Heroes
F W Boreham amplified his thoughts on the human passion for personalities when saying, “Men must have heroes, and if they cannot get the best, they will readily make shift with the best that they can get.”[1] The role of heroes in society, added Boreham, becomes more evident in turbulent times for “in days of crisis and tumult, strong personalities become emphatic, and the field of vision becomes dominated by a few commanding figures”.[2]

Boreham and Hero Worship
So important was this theme that Boreham confessed, “I had it in my heart to write a book [entitled] On heroes and hero-worship. But taking a mean advantage of the circumstance that [Thomas Carlyle] arrived on this planet nearly a century before I did, he forestalled me and published the book thirty years before I was born.”[3] Carlyle influenced Boreham’s views about the importance of heroes. However, recognizing that one’s choice of heroes is usually a matter of personal taste, Boreham said that if the task had fallen to him, “I should have given short shrift to some of his heroes, and, to redress the balance, should have included some over whom he has passed in silence”. While Boreham did not write a book entitled, On heroes, many of his editorials were written about his heroes, he devoted two biographies to two of his heroes—George Augustus Selwyn and The man who saved Gandhi (based on the life of Boreham’s mentor, J J Doke)—and five of his books are collections of essays (reworked editorials and sermons) on the lives of people whom Boreham venerated.[4]

Boreham Pantheon
Boreham’s pantheon of heroes was broad and included the warrior-heroes, navigators and sea dogs that dominated the attention of the early Victorians. However, his heroes were mainly drawn from those who had made their mark in literature, politics, the church, science and invention and exploration.[5] The people he extolled were those who represented such virtues as endurance and constancy (James Watt),[6] courage and patience (Samuel Morse),[7] magnanimity (John Motley),[8] triumph over adversity (Robert Louis Stevenson)[9] and self-effacement (Catherine Blake).[10] While Boreham was intentional about telling the stories of Australian heroes, he did not appear to be attentive to the “new race of heroes” that Australians were discovering on the sporting field and in the bush.[11]

Power of One
Writing on the anniversary of the death of Lord Lister, Boreham indicated the importance of one significant person when he said, “Men of such a mould are the glory, not only of a nation, but of all mankind; and it is fitting that on every suitable occasion, we should recall their heroic achievements and acknowledge their incalculable debt under which they have placed us”.[12] Similarly, in describing the impact of Ambrose on Augustine, Boreham acknowledged, “It often happens that the biggest thing in even the biggest city is the commanding personality of one man”.[13] Boreham added that Augustine’s “hero-worship was intensified by the intimate experience of contact and conversation”, thus demonstrating the influence of personal contact between a hero and a hero-worshipper.

Ongoing Influence
While recognising the influence of a hero while they are living, Boreham curiously remarked that “many a man does his best work AFTER he is dead…. No man likes to feel he dies when he dies”.[14] Boreham developed this thought in his writing about heroes in an editorial on the influence of John Bunyan: “In 10 days he was dead. But, as so often happens, his death made little difference to him. It was merely an episode in his triumphal progress. In reality he was never so much alive as he is today. His books represent his most imposing monument; and, in the writings of those who have modelled themselves on his perfect style, he lives a thousand lives, quite anonymously but with tremendous effect”.[15]

Lighting a Torch
As with John Bunyan, Boreham believed that “a great spirit often does his best work not in his own proper person, but by means of the disciples and students who rise up to succeed him and carry on his work”.[16] Expanding on this theme, Boreham said, “History abounds in illustrations of the way in which a master, by personal contact with a disciple, will light a torch that illumines the world with a brighter light than he himself has ever been able to radiate”.[17] Boreham believed a hero’s influence often was conveyed quite unconsciously, but at other times influential personalities such as Charles Simeon profoundly impressed John Wesley and William Wilberforce through an intentional commitment to fire the imagination of his students with a noble cause.[18]

Hero Worshippers
While Boreham wrote editorials about the need for heroes, he also addressed the subject of hero-worshippers. These are the people, who in speaking or writing about their heroes sow within their hearers and readers the seeds of heroism. Writing about Richard Hakluyt, the Oxford lecturer in geography and cosmography from the sixteenth century, Boreham said:

“And does not the hero worshipper who takes the trouble to transmit to posterity his veneration for his idol pass the spirit of heroism, like a flaming torch, from one generation to another? It is the vital principle out of which the shining web of history is spun. An earnest man conveys the fire that burns within his own breast to the pages on his desk, and, just as fire communicated to paper spreads the conflagration to everything that the paper touches, so the reader who picks up these inspired pages falls under the influence of their radiance and their warmth. How many have become pilgrims through reading the story of Bunyan’s pilgrimage? How many have made the greatest of all confessions through reading the Confessions of St. Augustine? How many apostolic acts have been inspired by the Acts of the Apostles? And, by the same token, how many gallant souls have done a brave day’s work for England through perusing the Voyages written by the sixteenth century rector?”[19]

One detects within this editorial an insight into the motivation of Boreham that in writing passionately about his heroes he was seeking to transmit “the spirit of heroism” to his readers.

National Heroes
Along with the new appreciation of history in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Davison observes that the “traditional resistance to hero-worship seems to have weakened” with interest being focused by the media and motivational agencies on ordinary Australians such as bushfire fighters.[20] This resurgence of interest appears to vindicate Boreham’s move to focus on Australian heroes whose lives were more within the reach of his readers in terms of the context of their exploits and the virtues they embodied.

Geoff Pound

Image: Nelson Mandela, a popular hero.

[1] Boreham, Mercury, 8 December 1923.
[2] Boreham, Mercury, 8 December 1923.
[3] F W Boreham, When the swans fly high (London: The Epworth Press, 1931), 145-146. The book Boreham refers to is Thomas Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history (London: Ward, Lock & Co Ltd, 1841).
[4] These books are A bunch of everlastings, A handful of stars, A casket of cameos, A faggot of torches and The temple of topaz.
[5] A survey, undertaken by the author, taking a sample of sixty-eight biographical editorials drawn from Mercury editorials in the 1940s and 1950s, investigated the fields in which Boreham’s subjects (heroes) had made their mark. It revealed that literary heroes were most prominent—(forty-four percent), followed by political heroes (thirteen percent), heroes of the church (ten percent), inventors (nine percent) and explorers (six percent). Other heroes listed came from the spheres of art, medicine, history, war, philosophy, drama, education and social justice. (The high proportion of literary heroes in Boreham’s Mercury editorials in this period was affected by his other role as a contributor to the Literary Supplement of the Age.)
[6] Boreham, Mercury, 26 September 1925.
[7] Boreham, Mercury, 18 July 1936.
[8] Boreham, Mercury, 30 May 1925.
[9] Boreham, Mercury, 11 July 1936.
[10] Boreham, Mercury, 13 August 1949.
[11] For example, Manning Clark includes in ‘the new race of heroes’ bush people like Jim Jones and Ned Kelly who defied the authorities, Australian cricket heroes (such as Warwick Armstrong and Donald Bradman) who conquered their British opponents and AFL footballer Roy Cazaly. C Manning H Clark, A history of Australia, 1916-1935. vol. 6. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987), 208-209.
[12] Boreham, Mercury, 10 February 1951.
[13] Boreham, Mercury, 28 August 1948.
[14] Boreham, Mercury, 10 October 1942; Age, 11 November 1950.
[15] Boreham, Mercury, 31 August 1946.
[16] Boreham, Mercury, 26 May 1945; Age, 17 March 1951.
[17] Boreham, Mercury, 28 August 1948.
[18] Boreham, Mercury, 13 November 1948.
[19] Boreham, Mercury, 23 November 1946.
[20] Davison, The use and misuse of Australian history, 25-26.

Boreham's Call for Human-Centred History

Teaching By Examples
In commem-orating the centenary of the completion of Macaulay’s History of England, F W Boreham sought to explain the “extraordinary sensation” that the book had upon its readers.[1] He believed its success could be in part attributed to Macaulay’s human-centred approach to the writing of history.[2] Borrowing Lord Macaulay’s definition, he stated, “History is Philosophy Teaching By Examples”.[3]

Communicate the Human Element
Boreham frequently called for historical writing that contained the human element that was evident in good fiction. For instance, he once commented: “One sometimes wishes that the average novelist and the average historian could be shaken up in a bag and their qualities distributed. The result would probably lend a new grandeur to fiction and a new realism to history”.[4]

Passion for the Personal
In an editorial entitled ‘Passion for the personal’, Boreham said, “We humans have an insatiable passion for personalities. It is the dominant factor in our conversation and our correspondence”.[5] The importance of ‘the personal equation’ was, according to Boreham, one of the reasons why the writing of history must deal primarily with people’s stories. The human-centred approach to history gave good scope for writing in concrete language about the admirable virtues and qualities that a person embodied. Boreham’s passion for personalities found expression in the number of historical editorials he wrote in which abstract principles were clothed and movements found expression in the colourful stories of human lives.

Individuals as Representative Figures
While Boreham wrote numerous editorials on one person, his aim was not only to inspire individual readers but also to let his subject serve as a representative figure who embodied a national aspiration or a type of the ideal human.[6] Levin elaborated upon this approach when saying, “The representative man was both an historical phenomenon and a literary device. For an age that glorified individualism, for historians who emphasised moral responsibility and to whom self-reliance was a moral duty, the historical character had to be influential”.[7] Boreham illustrated the way that the passion for personalities is the same impulse that drives people to associate the name of a person with a historical movement or tradition in the following manner:

“In recalling some impressive period of human history, we instinctively summon to the mind the face and features of some outstanding individual. Our naval traditions become incarnate in the heroic figure of Nelson; the abolition of slavery automatically recalls the dwarfish frame of William Wilberforce; the industrial revolution expresses itself in the thought of Lord Shaftesbury. In contrast with all the other sacred books, the Bible consists of a ceaseless pageant of personal records, and the redemption of the world is revealed in a thorn-crowned face.”[8]

Crystallized History
Asking the famous question, ‘What’s in a name?’ Boreham argued that if in ordinary life names are more than mere identification tags then how much more meaning do names possess in history? Referring to the way names may signify movements and personify traditions, he wrote, “Names are crystallized history; they stir the blood like trumpet calls and bugle blasts; they are pregnant with significance and challenge”.[9]

Geoff Pound

Image: Human-Centred history

[1] Boreham, Mercury, 1 October 1949.
[2] Thomas Carlyle makes a similar endorsement about the writings of Walter Scott, saying Scott’s world was “actually filled by living men… not abstraction”. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, Thomas Carlyle's collected works, Vol. 5 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869) 275.
[3] Boreham, Mercury, 1 October 1949.
[4] Boreham, Age, 4 January 1947; Age, 1 October 1949.
[5] Boreham, Mercury, 8 September 1956.
[6] This was a popular historical and literary device employed by essayists and historians. Emerson, in many of his essays, focused on such representative men in articles entitled, ‘Plato, or the philosopher’, Swedenborg, or the mystic’, ‘Montaigne, or the sceptic’ and ‘Shakespeare, or the poet’. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson comprising his essays, lectures, poems, and orations vol. 1 (London: Bell and Daldy, 1866), 288-311, 311-335, 335-352, 352-365.
[7] Levin, History as romantic art: Bancroft, Motley, and Parkman, 51.
[8] Boreham, Mercury, 8 September 1956.
[9] Boreham, Mercury, 24 September 1927.