of Greek literature.  So far from contradicting the Christian ideal, they harmonised with—­I had almost said they supplemented—­that more tender and saintly ideal of heroism which had sprung up during the earlier Middle Ages.  They justified, and actually gave a new life to, the old noblenesses of chivalry, which had grown up in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active and manly virtue to the passive and feminine virtue of the cloister.  They inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a literature, both in England, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, the chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature which developed itself in Ariosto, in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser’s ’Fairy Queen’—­perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by mortal man.

And why?  What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though they be, and fables, and fair dreams?  What, though they have no body, and, perhaps, never had, has given them an immortal soul, which can speak to the immortal souls of all generations to come?

What but this, that in them—­dim it may be and undeveloped, but still there—­lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the perfection of heroism; of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and the highest joy of him who claims a kindred with the gods?

Let us say, then, that true heroism must involve self-sacrifice.  Those stories certainly involve it, whether ancient or modern, which the hearts, not of philosophers merely, or poets, but of the poorest and the most ignorant, have accepted instinctively as the highest form of moral beauty—­the highest form, and yet one possible to all.

Grace Darling rowing out into the storm toward the wreck.—­The “drunken private of the Buffs,” who, prisoner among the Chinese, and commanded to prostrate himself and kotoo, refused in the name of his country’s honour—­“He would not bow to any Chinaman on earth:”  and so was knocked on the head, and died surely a hero’s death.—­Those soldiers of the ‘Birkenhead,’ keeping their ranks to let the women and children escape, while they watched the sharks who in a few minutes would be tearing them limb from limb.—­Or, to go across the Atlantic—­for there are heroes in the Far West—­Mr. Bret Harte’s “Flynn of Virginia,” on the Central Pacific Railway—­the place is shown to travellers—­who sacrificed his life for his married comrade,—­

   “There, in the drift,
   Back to the wall,
   He held the timbers
   Ready to fall. 
   Then in the darkness
   I heard him call,—­
   ’Run for your life, Jake! 
   Run for your wife’s sake! 
   Don’t wait for me.’

   “And that was all
   Heard in the din—­
   Heard of Tom Flynn,
   Flynn of Virginia.”