back to the wall with large nails.  I asked the reason, and was told that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years.  Strangers may present themselves at any hour, and in whatever number; the master has amply provided for the reception of the men and their animals, and is never happier than when they tarry for some time.  Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country.”  The magnanimous know very well that they who give time, or money, or shelter, to the stranger—­so it be done for love, and not for ostentation—­do, as it were, put God under obligation to them, so perfect are the compensations of the universe.  In some way the time they seem to lose is redeemed, and the pains they seem to take remunerate themselves.  These men fan the flame of human love, and raise the standard of civil virtue among mankind.  But hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host.  The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies.  It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks[337] and fair water than belong to city feasts.

9.  The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has.  But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity.  It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold.  A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.  John Eliot,[338] the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine,—­“It is a noble, generous liquor, and we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before it.”  Better still is the temperance of king David[339] who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.

10.  It is told of Brutus,[340] that when he fell on his sword, after the battle of Philippi,[341] he quoted a line of Euripides,[342]—­“O virtue!  I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade.”  I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report.  The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness.  It does not ask to dine nicely, and to sleep warm.  The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.  Poverty is its ornament.  It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.

11.  But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the good humor and hilarity they exhibit.  It is a height to which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity.  But these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness.  Scipio,[343] charged with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes.  Socrates’[344] condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum,[345] during his life, and Sir Thomas More’s[346] playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain.  In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Sea Voyage,” Juletta tells the stout captain and his company,