o raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable
bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no part of valour. The
truest courage with them is that which is the least noisy and
obtrusive. But confront one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer
of real life, and his confidence in the theory quickly vanishes.
Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest
inoffensive deportment does not necessarily imply valour; neither does
the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hickman wanted
modesty--we do not mean _him_ of Clarissa--but who ever doubted his
courage? Even the poets--upon whom this equitable distribution of
qualities should be most binding--have thought it agreeable to nature
to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the "Agonistes," is
indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once
a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of
driving armies singly before him--and does it. Tom Brown had a
shrewder insight into this kind of character than either of his
predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a
sort of dimidiate pre-eminence:--"Bully Dawson kicked by half the
town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true
distributive justice.

III

THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK

At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear,
and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not
naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere human gentleman--that
has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such
preposterous exercises--we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of
course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour,
at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. We think of
it, we say; for to do it in earnest, requires another half-hour's good
consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told,
and such like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer time especially,
some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, as
they say, only for getting up. But, having been tempted, once or
twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our
curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's
courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of
the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in
them, besides, something Pagan an