se, the bank, or the manufactory.

The other--an even more striking instance of the possibility, at least,
of heroism anywhere and everywhere--is Mr. Thackeray's 'Esmond.' On the
meaning of that book I can speak with authority. For my dear and
regretted friend told me himself that my interpretation of it was the
true one; that this was the lesson which he meant men to learn therefrom.

Esmond is a man of the first half of the eighteenth century; living in a
coarse, drunken, ignorant, profligate, and altogether unheroic age. He
is--and here the high art and the high morality of Mr. Thackeray's genius
is shown--altogether a man of his own age. He is not a sixteenth-century
or a nineteenth-century man born out of time. His information, his
politics, his religion, are no higher than of those round him. His
manners, his views of human life, his very prejudices and faults, are
those of his age. The temptations which he conquers are just those under
which the men around him fall. But how does he conquer them? By holding
fast throughout to honour, duty, virtue. Thus, and thus alone, he
becomes an ideal eighteenth-century gentleman, an eighteenth-century
hero. This was what Mr. Thackeray meant--for he told me so himself, I
say--that it was possible, even in England's lowest and foulest times, to
be a gentleman and a hero, if a man would but be true to the light within
him.

But I will go further. I will go from ideal fiction to actual, and yet
ideal, fact; and say that, as I read history, the most unheroic age which
the civilized world ever saw was also the most heroic; that the spirit of
man triumphed most utterly over his circumstances, at the very moment
when those circumstances were most against him.

How and why he did so is a question for philosophy in the highest sense
of that word. The fact of his having done so is matter of history. Shall
I solve my own riddle?

Then, have we not heard of the early Christian martyrs? Is there a doubt
that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, did
exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infinite
self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; did
raise the ideal of human nobleness a whole stage--rather say, a whole
heaven--higher than before; and that wherever the tale of their great
deeds spread, men accepted, even if they did not copy, those martyrs as
ideal specimens of the human race, till they were actually worshi