Excerpt from The Lantern, Vol. 2: April, 1916 The inner and essential elements of greatness re main the same in every age but the popular ideals of greatness change. A Madame de Pompadour might have some difficulty in winning recognition today, or even that Countess of Bedford of whom Ben Jonson gave us a portrait: Courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness - pride. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.