rbane in manner, he was brave
and honorable in conduct; in words he could flatter, in deeds he was
sincere.

Sir Sedley Beaudesert had never married. Whatever his years, he was
still young enough in looks to be married for love. He was high-born,
he was rich, he was, as I have said, popular; yet on his fair features
there was an expression of melancholy, and on that forehead--pure from
the lines of ambition, and free from the weight of study--there was the
shadow of unmistakable regret.

"I don't know that," said my father; "I have never yet found in life
one man who made happiness his end and aim. One wants to gain a fortune,
another to spend it; one to get a place, another to build a name: but
they all know very well that it is not happiness they search for. No
Utilitarian was ever actuated by self-interest, poor man, when he
sat down to scribble his unpopular crotchets to prove self-interest
universal. And as to that notable distinction between self-interest
vulgar and self-interest enlightened, the more the self-interest is
enlightened, the less we are influenced by it. If you tell the young man
who has just written a fine book or made a fine speech that he will not
be any happier if he attain to the fame of Milton or the power of
Pitt, and that, for the sake of his own happiness, he had much better
cultivate a farm, live in the country, and postpone to the last the
days of dyspepsia and gout, he will answer you fairly, 'I am quite as
sensible of that as you are. But I am not thinking whether or not I
shall be happy. I have made up my mind to be, if I can, a great author
or a prime minister.' So it is with all the active sons of the world.
To push on is the law of Nature. And you can no more say to men and to
nations than to children: 'Sit still, and don't wear out your shoes!'"

"Then," said Trevanion, "if I tell you I am not happy, your only answer
is that I obey an inevitable law."

"No, I don't say that it is an inevitable law that man should not be
happy; but it is an inevitable law that a man, in spite of himself,
should live for something higher than his own happiness. He cannot live
in himself or for himself, however egotistical he may try to be. Every
desire he has links him with others. Man is not a machine,--he is a part
of one."

"True, brother, he is a soldier, not an army," said Captain Roland.

"Life is a drama, not a monologue," pursued my father. "'Drama' is
derived from a Greek verb signifyi