can do the gods.

Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth.
This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.

Val. What ails my brother?

Soph. Martius, O Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.

Dor. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?

Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captivated me,
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity.

I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or oration that
our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the same tune. We
have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often the sound of
any fife. Yet, Wordsworth's "Laodamia," and the ode of "Dion," and some
sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott will sometimes draw a
stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of Burley.
Thomas Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly and daring in
character, has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from
his biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has
given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is an account
of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read. And Simon Ockley's
History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual valor,
with admiration all the more evident on the part of the narrator that he
seems to think that his place in Christian Oxford requires of him some
proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the literature
of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and
historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminondas, the
Scipio of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than
to all the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the
despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A
wild courage, a Stoicism not of the