his house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his
guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the
many lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in his turn,
and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and animating force of
eloquence and enthusiasm, that they were struck dumb, and, after some
pause, rose up all together with earnestness, exclaiming, 'Let us set
out with him immediately.'" Men in all ways are better than they seem.
They like flattery for the moment, but they know the truth for their
own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them and
speaking to them rude truth. They resent your honesty for an instant,
they will thank you for it always. What is it we heartily wish of each
other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and
exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men
of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike
through the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave a
sense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I explain so,--by
this manlike love of truth,--those excesses and errors into which souls
of great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel the poverty
at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world. They know the
speed with which they come straight through the thin masquerade, and
conceive a disgust at the indigence of nature: Rousseau, Mirabeau,
Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron,--and I could easily add names nearer home,
of raging riders, who drive their steeds so hard, in the violence of
living to forget its illusion: they would know the worst, and tread
the floors of hell. The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon,
Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated life and
fortune as a game to be well and skilfully played, but the stake not
to be so valued but that any time it could be held as a trifle light
as air, and thrown up. Caesar, just before the battle of Pharsalia,
discourses with the Egyptian priest concerning the fountains of the
Nile, and offers to quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will
show him those mysterious sources.

The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in the
preference, namely, which each man gives to the society of superiors
over that of his equals. All that a man has will he give for right
relations with his mates. All that he has will he give for an erect