e of death with unflinching eye, to die laughing under
the bites of adders, to lament neither their sins nor the loss of
their dearest friends--these were the characteristics of the old
heroic courage of the north. Palnatoki forbade his Jomsburgers either
to fear or so much as to mention the name of fear.

Not so the Greek. He felt and feared. He gave utterance to his pain
and sorrow. He was ashamed of no human weaknesses, only none of them
must hold him back from the path of honor, or impede him in the
fulfilment of his duty. What in the barbarian sprang from habit and
ferocity arose from principle in the Greek. With him heroism was as
the spark concealed in flint, which, so long as no external force
awakens it, sleeps in quiet, nor robs the stone either of its
clearness or its coldness. With the barbarian it was a bright
consuming flame, which was ever roaring, and devoured, or at least
blackened, every other good quality. Thus, when Homer makes the
Trojans march to the combat with wild cries, the Greeks, on the
contrary, in resolute silence, the critics justly observe that the
poet intended to depict the one as barbarians, the other as a
civilized people. I wonder that they have not remarked a similar
contrast of character in another passage. The hostile armies have made
a truce; they are busied with burning their dead; and these rites are
accompanied on both sides with the warm flow of tears. But Priam
forbids the Trojans to weep. He forbade them to weep, says Dacier,
because he feared the effect would be too softening, and that on the
morrow they would go with less courage to the battle. True! But why, I
ask, should Priam only fear this result? Why does not Agamemnon also
lay the same prohibition on the Greeks? The poet has a deeper meaning;
he wishes to teach us that the civilized Greek could be brave at the
same time that he wept, while in the uncivilized Trojan all human
feelings were to be previously stifled.

It is worth observing that among the few tragedies which have come
down to us from antiquity two are found in which bodily pain
constitutes not the lightest part of the misfortune which befalls the
suffering heroes--the Philoctetes and the dying Hercules. Sophocles
paints the last also as moaning and shrieking, weeping and crying.
Thanks to our polite neighbors, those masters of propriety, no such
ridiculous and intolerable characters as a moaning Philoctetes or a
shrieking Hercules will ever again appe