"And who is king to-day ?" the painter Greuze would ask of his daughter, during the throes of the first French Revolution, when men, great for the time, were suddenly thrown to the surface, and as suddenly dropt out of sight again, never to reappear.

"And who is king to-day?
After all," Greuze would add, "Citizen Homer and Citizen Raphael will outlive those great citizens of ours, whose names I have never before heard of." Yet of the personal history of Homer nothing is known, and of Raphael comparatively little.

Even Plutarch, who wrote the lives of others: so well, has no biography, none of the eminent Roman writers who were his contemporaries having so much as mentioned his name.

And so of Correggio, who delineated the features of others so well, there is not known to exist an authentic portrait.
There have been men who greatly influenced the life of their time, whose reputation has been much greater with posterity than it was with their contemporaries.

Of Wickliffe, the patriarch of the Reformation, our knowledge is extremely small.