n proportion to the
instruction and delight they are conscious they receive. The sentiment
of admiration springs immediately from this ground, and cannot be
otherwise than well founded.(3)

The effeminate clinging to life as such, as a general or abstract idea,
is the effect of a highly civilised and artificial state of society. Men
formerly plunged into all the vicissitudes and dangers of war, or staked
their all upon a single die, or some one passion, which if they could
not have gratified, life became a burden to them--now our strongest
passion is to think, our chief amusement is to read new plays, new
poems, new novels, and this we may do at our leisure, in perfect
security, _ad infinitum_. If we look into the old histories and
romances, before the _belles-lettres_ neutralised human affairs and
reduced passion to a state of mental equivocation, we find the heroes
and heroines not setting their lives 'at a pin's fee,' but rather
courting opportunities of throwing them away in very wantonness of
spirit. They raise their fondness for some favourite pursuit to its
height, to a pitch of madness, and think no price too dear to pay for
its full gratification. Everything else is dross. They go to death as to
a bridal bed, and sacrifice themselves or others without remorse at the
shrine of love, of honour, of religion, or any other prevailing feeling.
Romeo runs his 'sea-sick, weary bark upon the rocks' of death the
instant he finds himself deprived of his Juliet; and she clasps his
neck in their last agonies, and follows him to the same fatal shore. One
strong idea takes possession of the mind and overrules every other;
and even life itself, joyless without that, becomes an object of
indifference or loathing. There is at least more of imagination in such
a state of things, more vigour of feeling and promptitude to act, than
in our lingering, languid, protracted attachment to life for its own
poor sake. It is, perhaps, also better, as well as more heroical, to
strike at some daring or darling object, and if we fail in that, to
take the consequences manfully, than to renew the lease of a tedious,
spiritless, charmless existence, merely (as Pierre says) 'to lose it
afterwards in some vile brawl' for some worthless object. Was there
not a spirit of martyrdom as well as a spice of the reckless energy of
barbarism in this bold defiance of death? Had not religion something to
do with it: the implicit belief in a future life, which