avours. Chance comes to Tom and we find him out. To Harry the Fates
were less kind. A ne'er-do-well was Harry--drank, knocked his wife
about, they say. Bury him, we are well rid of him, he was good for
nothing. Are we sure?

Let us acknowledge we are sinners. We know, those of us who dare to
examine ourselves, that we are capable of every meanness, of every
wrong under the sun. It is by the accident of circumstance, aided by the
helpful watchfulness of the policeman, that our possibilities of crime
are known only to ourselves. But having acknowledged our evil, let us
also acknowledge that we are capable of greatness. The martyrs who faced
death and torture unflinchingly for conscience' sake, were men and women
like ourselves. They had their wrong side. Before the small trials of
daily life they no doubt fell as we fall. By no means were they the pick
of humanity. Thieves many of them had been, and murderers, evil-livers,
and evil-doers. But the nobility was there also, lying dormant, and
their day came. Among them must have been men who had cheated their
neighbours over the counter; men who had been cruel to their wives and
children; selfish, scandal-mongering women. In easier times their virtue
might never have been known to any but their Maker.

In every age and in every period, when and where Fate has called upon
men and women to play the man, human nature has not been found wanting.
They were a poor lot, those French aristocrats that the Terror seized:
cowardly, selfish, greedy had been their lives. Yet there must have been
good, even in them. When the little things that in their little lives
they had thought so great were swept away from them, when they found
themselves face to face with the realities; then even they played the
man. Poor shuffling Charles the First, crusted over with weakness and
folly, deep down in him at last we find the great gentleman.

I like to hear stories of the littleness of great men. I like to think
that Shakespeare was fond of his glass. I even cling to the tale of that
disgraceful final orgie with friend Ben Jonson. Possibly the story may
not be true, but I hope it was. I like to think of him as poacher, as
village ne'er-do-well, denounced by the local grammar-school master,
preached at by the local J. P. of the period. I like to reflect that
Cromwell had a wart on his nose; the thought makes me more contented
with my own features. I like to think that he put sweets upon the
chairs,