and I have observed (both in the Painted
Hall and elsewhere, and not only in portraits, but in the actual
presence of such renowned people as I have caught glimpses of) that
the countenances of heroes are not nearly so impressive as those of
statesmen,--except, of course, in the rare instances where warlike
ability has been but the one-sided manifestation of a profound genius
for managing the world's affairs. Nine-tenths of these distinguished
admirals, for instance, if their faces tell truth, must needs have been
blockheads, and might have served better, one would imagine, as wooden
figureheads for their own ships than to direct any difficult and
intricate scheme of action from the quarter-deck. It is doubtful whether
the same kind of men will hereafter meet with a similar degree of
success; for they were victorious chiefly through the old English
hardihood, exercised in a field of which modern science had not yet got
possession. Rough valor has lost something of its value, since their
days, and must continue to sink lower and lower in the comparative
estimate of warlike qualities. In the next naval war, as between England
and France, I would bet, methinks, upon the Frenchman's head.

It is remarkable, however, that the great naval hero of England--the
greatest, therefore, in the world, and of all time--had none of the
stolid characteristics that belong to his class, and cannot fairly
be accepted as their representative man. Foremost in the roughest of
professions, he was as delicately organized as a woman, and as painfully
sensitive as a poet. More than any other Englishman he won the love
and admiration of his country, but won them through the efficacy of
qualities that are not English, or, at all events, were intensified in
his case and made poignant and powerful by something morbid in the man,
which put him otherwise at cross-purposes with life. He was a man of
genius; and genius in an Englishman (not to cite the good old simile of
a pearl in the oyster) is usually a symptom of a lack of balance in
the general making-up of the character; as we may satisfy ourselves by
running over the list of their poets, for example, and observing how
many of them have been sickly or deformed, and how often their lives
have been darkened by insanity. An ordinary Englishman is the healthiest
and wholesomest of human beings; an extraordinary one is almost always,
in one way or another, a sick man. It was so with Lord Nelson. The
won