ct more
important than many of the sovereign princes on the other side of the
Rhine--was an English manufacturer, who had established himself there
some twenty years ago, without much capital, and had effected all this
by his industry and enterprise.

Such, sir, is the spirit of the age; of course, in this young and
wonderfully progressive country, it is more eager and ardent--and
therefore occasionally extravagant--than anywhere else. But it is in
vain to resist it. Nay, I believe it is worse than vain. It is
evidently in the order of nature, and we must take it with all its
good and all its evils together.

DEMOSTHENES' COURAGE.

[_From the Essay on Demosthenes._]

The charge of effeminacy and want of courage in battle seems to be
considered as better founded. Plutarch admits it fully. His foppery is
matter of ridicule to AEschines, who, at the same time, in rather a
remarkable passage in his speech on the Crown, gives us some clue to
the popular report as to his deficiency in the military virtues of
antiquity. "Who," says he "will be there to sympathize with him? Not
they who have been trained with him in the same gymnasium? No, by
Olympian Jove! for, in his youth, instead of hunting the wild boar and
addicting himself to exercises which give strength and activity to the
body, he was studying the arts that were one day to make him the
scourge of the rich." Those exercises were, in the system of the
Greeks, . . . considered as absolutely indispensable to a liberal
education. That of Demosthenes was certainly neglected by his
guardians, and the probability is that the effeminacy with which he
was reproached meant nothing more than that he had not frequented in
youth the palestra and the gymnasium, and that his bodily training had
been sacrificed to his intellectual.

That he possessed moral courage of the most sublime order is passed
all question; but his nerves were weak. If the tradition that is come
down to us in regard to his natural defects as an orator is not a
gross exaggeration, he had enough to occupy him for years in the
correction of them. But what an idea does it suggest to us of the
mighty will, the indomitable spirit, the decided and unchangeable
vocation, that, in spite of so many impediments, his genius fulfilled
its destiny, and attained at last to the supremacy at which it aimed
from the first! His was that deep love of ideal beauty, that
passionate pursuit of eloquence in the abstract, that