e the two qualities best worth a good man's
cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our
precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at
all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not
looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the
past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world.

And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a good
citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is
nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own
carcase has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who took
his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had
all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own
digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a
dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous
acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for
parlours with a regulated temperature, and takes his morality on the
principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or
soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world begin
to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature;
and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain. To be overwise
is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. Now
the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock
of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and
cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world,
keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he
runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he
may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his
health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of
the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril towards his aim.
Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all
sides of all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed
friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal
synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover
of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his
inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly
warfare, push on at his bes