of the bear of his native
forests that he had "ten men's strength and eleven men's wisdom." How
could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages and
since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem--that
the actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by passions
but too exactly like those of the lower animals? I have said, and say
again, with good old Vaughan--

"Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man."

But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many a
sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted the
monkey's heroism from quite a different point of view; and would have
said that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some
"divine afflatus"--an expression quite as philosophical and quite as
intelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read now-a-days--and
had been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfish
monkey-nature, just as man requires to be raised above his. But that
theory belongs to a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion,
and which will have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion
again.

And now: if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, I
must protest against a use of the word sacrifice which is growing too
common in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an "enormous
sacrifice of life;" an expression which means merely that a great many
poor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for no
purpose whatsoever: no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons
of ignorance, cupidity or mismanagement.

The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words,
who, when asked, "In what sense might Charles the First be said to be a
martyr?" answered, "In the same sense that a man might be said to be a
martyr to the gout."

And I must protest, in like wise, against a misuse of the words hero,
heroism, heroic, which is becoming too common, namely, applying them to
mere courage. We have borrowed the misuse, I believe, as we have more
than one beside, from the French press. I trust that we shall neither
accept it, nor the temper which inspires it. It may be convenient for
those who flatter their nation, and especially the military part of it,
into a ruinous self-conceit, to frame some such syllogism as
this--"Courage is heroism: every Frenchman is naturally courageous:
theref