power of goodness to charm and to command. The man inspired
by it is the true king of men, drawing all hearts after him. When
General Nicholson lay wounded on his deathbed before Delhi, he dictated
this last message to his equally noble and gallant friend, Sir Herbert
Edwardes:--"Tell him," said he, "I should have been a better man if
I had continued to live with him, and our heavy public duties had not
prevented my seeing more of him privately. I was always the better for
a residence with him and his wife, however short. Give my love to them
both!"

There are men in whose presence we feel as if we breathed a spiritual
ozone, refreshing and invigorating, like inhaling mountain air, or
enjoying a bath of sunshine. The power of Sir Thomas More's gentle
nature was so great that it subdued the bad at the same time that it
inspired the good. Lord Brooke said of his deceased friend, Sir Philip
Sidney, that "his wit and understanding beat upon his heart, to make
himself and others, not in word or opinion, but in life and action, good
and great."

The very sight of a great and good man is often an inspiration to the
young, who cannot help admiring and loving the gentle, the brave, the
truthful, the magnanimous! Chateaubriand saw Washington only once,
but it inspired him for life. After describing the interview, he says:
"Washington sank into the tomb before any little celebrity had attached
to my name. I passed before him as the most unknown of beings. He was
in all his glory--I in the depth of my obscurity. My name probably dwelt
not a whole day in his memory. Happy, however, was I that his looks were
cast upon me. I have felt warmed for it all the rest of my life. There
is a virtue even in the looks of a great man."

When Niebuhr died, his friend, Frederick Perthes, said of him: "What a
contemporary! The terror of all bad and base men, the stay of all the
sterling and honest, the friend and helper of youth." Perthes said
on another occasion: "It does a wrestling man good to be constantly
surrounded by tried wrestlers; evil thoughts are put to flight when the
eye falls on the portrait of one in whose living presence one would have
blushed to own them." A Catholic money-lender, when about to cheat, was
wont to draw a veil over the picture of his favourite saint. So Hazlitt
has said of the portrait of a beautiful female, that it seemed as if an
unhandsome action would be impossible in its presence. "It does one good
to look