mself down and writhe upon the floor in his paroxysms
of pain, he rose up, livid with exhaustion, and with the sweat of
anguish on his brow, without a murmur.

In the whole library of brave anecdote there is no tale of heroism
which, to us, beats this. It very nearly equals that of poor, feeble
Latimer, cheering up his fellow-martyr as he walked to the stake, "Be of
good cheer, brother Ridley; we shall this day light such a fire in
England as by God's grace shall not be readily put out." The very play
upon the torture is brave, yet pathetic. Wonderful, too, was the
boldness and cheerfulness of another martyr, Rowland Taylor, who,
stripped to his shirt, was forced to walk toward the stake, who answered
the jeers of his persecutors and the tears of his friends with the same
noble constant smile, and, meeting two of his very old parishioners who
wept, stopped and cheered _them_ as he went, adding, that he went on his
way rejoicing.

Heroes and martyrs are perhaps too high examples, for they may have, or
rather poor, common, every-day humanity will think they have, a kind of
high-pressure sustainment. Let us look to our own prosaic days; let us
mark the constant cheerfulness and manliness of Dr. Maginn, or that much
higher heroic bearing of Tom Hood. We suppose that every body knows that
Hood's life was not of that brilliant, sparkling, fizzing, banging,
astonishing kind which writers such as Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, and
some others, depict as the general life of literary men. He did not,
like Byron, "jump up one morning, and find himself famous." All the
libraries were not asking for his novel, though a better was not
written; countesses and dairy-women did not beg his autograph. His was a
life of constant hard work, constant trial or disappointment, and
constant illness, enlivened only by a home affection and a cheerfulness
as constant as his pain. When slowly, slowly dying, he made cheerful fun
as often almost as he said his prayers. He was heard, after, perhaps,
being almost dead, to laugh gently to himself in the still night, when
his wife or children, who were the watchers, thought him asleep. Many of
the hard lessons of fate he seasoned, as old Latimer did his sermons,
with a pun, and he excused himself from sending more "copy" for his
magazine by a sketch, the "Editor's Apologies," a rough pen-and-ink
drawing of physic-bottles and leeches. Yet Hood had not only his own
woes to bear, but felt for others. No one had