tters, you fulfil the whole
duty of man.

It is a still more difficult consideration for our average men, that
while all their teachers, from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin and the
ungodly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and
respectability, those characters in history who have most notoriously
flown in the face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms
of praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of our
commercial centres. This is very bewildering to the moral sense. You
have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable livelihood
under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonelling, in the company of
rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy
example for one's daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may have
pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent
navigator. His Life is not the kind of thing one would like to put into
the hands of young people; rather, one would do one's utmost to keep it
from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating
influence in life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the
big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even
shocking, to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I
imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude
towards the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of
the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a
performance of the _Lyons Mail_. Persons of substance take in the
_Times_ and sit composedly in pit or boxes according to the degree of
their prosperity in business. As for the generals who go galloping up
and down among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats--as for the actors who
raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the stage--they
must belong, thank God! to a different order of beings, whom we watch as
we watch the clouds careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read
about like characters in ancient and rather fabulous annals. Our
offspring would no more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope,
than of doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue in
consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of their school
history of England.

Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs hold their
own in theory; and it is another instance of the same spirit, that the
opinions of old men about lif