manner of
leaving it. Thomas Cromwell submitted to the axe without a complaint.
Lady Jane Grey, when on the scaffold, yielded nothing in manliness to
the others. Cranmer and the martyr bishops perished nobly. The Earl of
Essex, and Raleigh, and Strafford, and Strafford's master showed no fear
when the fatal moment came. In reading the fate of each, we sympathize
with the victim because of a certain dignity at the moment of death. But
there is, I think, no crisis of life in which it is so easy for a man to
carry himself honorably as that in which he has to leave it. "Venit
summa dies et ineluctabile tempus." No doubting now can be of avail. No
moment is left for the display of conduct beyond this, which requires
only decorum and a free use of the pulses to become in some degree
glorious. The wretch from the lowest dregs of the people can achieve it
with a halter round his neck. Cicero had that moment also to face; and
when it came he was as brave as the best Englishman of them all. But of
those I have named no one had an Atticus to whom it had been the
privilege of his life to open his very soul, in language so charming as
to make it worth posterity's while to read it, to study it, to sift it,
and to criticise it. Wolsey made many plaints in his misery, but they
have reached us in such forms of grace that they do not disparage him;
but then he too had no Atticus. Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke were
dismissed ministers and doomed to live in exile, the latter for many
years, and felt, no doubt, strongly their removal from the glare of
public life to obscurity. We hear no complaint from them which can
justify some future critic in saying that their wails were unworthy of a
woman; but neither of them was capable of telling an Atticus the
thoughts of his mind as they rose. What other public man ever had an
Atticus to whom, in the sorrows which the ingratitude of friends had
brought upon him, he could disclose every throb of his heart?

I think that we are often at a loss, in our efforts at appreciation of
character, and in the expressions of our opinion respecting it, to
realize the meaning of courage and manliness. That sententious Swedish
Queen, one of whose foolish maxims I have quoted, has said that Cicero,
though a coward, was capable of great actions, because she did not know
what a coward was. To doubt--to tremble with anxiety--to vacillate
hither and thither between this course and the other as to which may be
the better