squalor of domestic indifference or
solicitude. We think health universally interesting, we meditate on
diet, we measure our exercise, and shun all risks more carefully than
sin. Praising with our lips the glories of the soldier's death, we
tread with minute observance the bath-chair pathway to the sick-rooms of
old age.

Are our praises of death in victory, then, all cant, and are all the
eloquent rhapsodies of poets and essayists a sham? Montaigne seems to
have thought so, for, writing of those who talk fine of dying bravely,
he says:

"It happeneth that most men set a stern countenance on the matter, look
big, and speak stoutly, thereby to acquire reputation, which, if they
chance to live, they hope to enjoy."

The case of our eloquent rhapsodists who hymn the joys of sudden and
courageous death is evidently more favourable still, since they have
every chance of living for a time, and so of enjoying a reputation for
bravery without much risk. But rather than accuse mankind of purposely
dissembling terror in the hope of braggart fame, we would lay the charge
upon a queer divergence between the mind and the bodily will. No matter
what the mind may say in commendation of swift and glorious death, the
bodily will continues to maintain its life to the utmost, and is the
last and savages enemy that the mind can overcome. So it is that no one
should reckon beforehand upon courageous behaviour when the supreme
summons for courage comes, and only those are faultlessly brave who have
never known peril. In reason everyone is convinced that all mankind is
mortal, and we hear with vague sympathy of the hosts of dead whose
skulls went to pile the pyramids of Tamerlane, or of the thousands that
the sea engulfs and earthquakes shatter. But few realise that the life
of each among those thousands was as dear to him as our life is, and,
though we congratulate heroes upon the opportunity of their death, the
moment when that opportunity would be most happy for ourselves never
seems exactly to arrive. Hardly anyone really thinks he will die, or is
persuaded that the limit to his nature has now come. But it is through
realising the incalculable craving of this bodily will to survive that
men who have themselves known danger will pay the greater reverence to
those who, conscious of mortal fears, and throbbing with the fullness of
existence, none the less in the calm ecstasy of their devotion commit
themselves to the battle, the firing sq