of Malcolm M'Leod upon Charles Edward:--"He was the most cautious man,
not to be a coward, and the bravest man, not to be rash, that I ever
saw"; or that of Charles VII. of France upon Pierre d'Aubusson:--"Never
did I see united so much fire and so much wisdom."

Still again, men vary as to the form of danger which tests them most
severely. The Irish are undoubtedly a brave nation, but their
courage is apt to vanish in presence of sickness. They are not,
however, alone in this, if we may judge from the newspaper statements,
that, after the recent quarantine riots in New York, a small-pox
patient lay all day untended in the Park, because no one dared to go
near him. It is said of Dr. Johnson, that he was a hero against pain,
but a coward against death. Probably the contrary emotion is quite
as common. To a believer in immortality, death, even when premature,
can scarcely be regarded as an unmitigated evil, but pain enforces
its own recognition. We can hardly agree with the frightened recruit
in the farce, who thinks "Victory or Death" a forbidding war-cry,
but "Victory or Wooden Legs" a more appetizing alternative.

Beside these complications, there are those arising from the share
which conscience has in the matter. "Thrice is he armed that hath
his quarrel just," and the most resolute courage will sometimes
quail in a bad cause, and even die in its armor, like Bois-Guilbert.
It was generally admitted, on both sides, in Kansas, that the
"Border Ruffians" seldom dared face an equal number; yet nobody
asserted that these men were intrinsically deficient in daring; it
was only conscience which made cowards of them all.

But it is, after all, the faculty of imagination which, more than
all else, confuses the phenomena of courage and cowardice. A very
imaginative child is almost sure to be reproached with timidity,
while mere stolidity takes rank as courage. The bravest boy may
sometimes be most afraid of the dark, or of ghosts, or of the great
mysteries of storms and the sea. Even the mighty Charlemagne
shuddered when the professed enchanter brought before him the vast
forms of Dietrich and his Northern companions, on horseback. We once
saw a party of boys tested by an alarm which appealed solely to the
imagination. The only one among them who stood the test was the most
cowardly of the group, who escaped the contagion through sheer lack
of this faculty. Any imaginative person can occasionally test this
on himself by sl