emn and denounce with
bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium,
or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how
he dresses; but without railing or precision his living is natural
and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of
wine,--"It is a noble, generous liquor and we should be humbly thankful
for it, but, as I remember, water was made before it." Better still is
the temperance of King David, who poured out on the ground unto the Lord
the water which three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at the
peril of their lives.

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword after the battle
of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides,--"O Virtue! I have followed
thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade." I doubt not
the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its
justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep
warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well
abide its loss.

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, is the
good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common
duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life at so cheap a rate that
they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow,
but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation,
refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification,
though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears it to
pieces before the tribunes. Socrates's condemnation of himself to be
maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir
Thomas More's playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In
Beaumont and Fletcher's "Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain
and his company,--

Jul. Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye.
Master. Very likely,
'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of
a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take any thing
seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were
the building of cities or the eradication of old and foolish churches
and nations which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years.
S