low and defective. It has not
strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable
bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no part of valour.
The truest courage with them is that which is the least noisy and
obtrusive. But confront one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer
of real life, and his confidence in the theory quickly vanishes.
Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest
inoffensive deportment does not necessarily imply valour; neither does
the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hickman wanted
modesty--we do not mean _him_ of Clarissa--but who ever doubted his
courage? Even the poets--upon whom this equitable distribution of
qualities should be most binding--have thought it agreeable to nature
to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the "Agonistes," is
indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once
a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks
of driving armies singly before him--and does it. Tom Brown had a
shrewder insight into this kind of character than either of his
predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero
a sort of dimidiate pre-eminence:--"Bully Dawson kicked by half
the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true
distributive justice.

II.--THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS

The weakest part of mankind have this saying commonest in their mouth.
It is the trite consolation administered to the easy dupe, when he has
been tricked out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of
it will do the owner _no good_. But the rogues of this world--the
prudenter part of them, at least--know better; and, if the observation
had been as true as it is old, would not have failed by this time
to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distinctions of the
fluctuating and the permanent. "Lightly come, lightly go," is a
proverb, which they can very well afford to leave, when they leave
little else, to the losers. They do not always find manors, got by
rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have
it; or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thief's hand
that grasps it. Church land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly
denounced to have this slippery quality. But some portions of it
somehow always stuck so fast, that the denunciators have been vain to
postpone the prophecy of refundment to a late posterity.

III.--THAT