less and outlawed, alone raise the flag of revolt.
It is a satire; but in every satire there lies the germ of a terrible
fact.

You--you who are children still, you whose manhood is still a gold
scarcely touched in your hands, a gold you can spend in all great ways,
or squander for all base uses;--you can give the lie to that public
reproach, if only you will live in such wise that your hands shall be
clean, and your paths straight, and your honour unsullied through all
temptations. Wait, and live so that the right to judge, to rebuke, to
avenge, to purify, become yours through your earning of them. Live
nobly, first; and then teach others how to live.

* * *

"So you have brought Fame to Lelis, my English lord?" said Tricotrin,
without ceremony. "That was a good work of yours. She is a comet that
has a strange fancy only to come forth like a corpse-candle, and dance
over men's graves. It is her way. When men will have her out in the noon
of their youth, she kills them; and the painter's bier is set under his
Transfiguration, and the soldier's body is chained to the St. Helena
rock, and the poet's grave is made at Missolonghi. It is always so."

Estmere bowed his head in assent; he was endeavouring to remember where
he had once met this stranger who thus addressed him--where he had once
heard these mellow, ringing, harmonious accents.

"Was it because you were afraid of dying in your prime that you would
never woo Fame then yourself?" asked Lelis, with a smile.

"Oh-he!" answered Tricotrin, seating himself on a deal box that served
as a table, and whereat he and the artist had eaten many a meal of roast
chestnuts and black coffee; "I never wanted her; she is a weather vane,
never still two moments; she is a spaniel that quits the Plantagenet the
moment the battle goes against him, and fawns on Bolingbroke; she is an
alchemist's crucible, that has every fair and rich thing thrown into it,
but will only yield in return the calcined stones of chagrin and
disappointment; she is a harlot, whose kisses are to be bought, and who
runs after those who brawl the loudest and swagger the finest in the
world's market-places. No! I want nothing of her. My lord here condemned
her as I came in; he said she was the offspring of echoing parrots, of
imitative sheep, of fawning hounds. Who can want the creature of such
progenitors?"

* * *

"There are many kinds of appreciation. The man of sci