delights to honour—­ ministers, statesmen, lawyers, men of science, artists, poets, soldiers, who, if they were tried by the negative test, would show but a poor figure; yet their value is too real to be dispensed with; and we tolerate unquestionable wrong to secure the services of eminent ability.  The world really does, and it always has really done so from the beginning of the human history; and it is only indolence or cowardice which has left our ethical teaching halting so far behind the universal and necessary practice.  Even questionable prima donnas, in virtue of their sweet voices, have their praises hymned in drawing-room and newspaper, and applause rolls over them, and gold and bouquets shower on them from lips and hands which, except for those said voices, would treat them to a ruder reward.  In real fact, we take our places in this world not according to what we are not, but according to what we are.  His Holiness Pope Clement, when his audience-room rang with furious outcries for justice on Benvenuto Cellini, who, as far as half-a-dozen murders could form a title, was as fair a candidate for the gallows as ever swung from that unlucky wood, replied, “All this is very well, gentlemen:  these murders are bad things, we know that.  But where am I to get another Benvenuto, if you hang this one for me?”

Or, to take an acknowledged hero, one of the old Greek sort, the theme of the song of the greatest of human poets, whom it is less easy to refuse to admire than even our friend Reineke.  Take Ulysses.  It cannot be said that he kept his hands from taking what was not his, or his tongue from speaking what was not true; and if Frau Ermelyn had to complain (as indeed there was too much reason for her complaining) of certain infirmities in her good husband, Penelope, too, might have urged a thing or two, if she had known as much about the matter as we know, which the modern moralist would find it hard to excuse.

After all is said, the capable man is the man to be admired.  The man who tries and fails, what is the use of him?  We are in this world to do something—­ not to fail in doing it.  Of your bunglers—­helpless, inefficient persons, “unfit alike for good or ill,” who try one thing, and fail because they are not strong enough, and another, because they have not energy enough, and a third, because they have no talent—­inconsistent, unstable, and therefore never to excel, what shall we say of them? what use is there in them? what hope is there of them? what can we wish for them? to mepot’ einai pant’ ariston.  It were better for them they had never been born.  To be able to do what a man tries to do, that is the first requisite; and given that, we may hope all things for him.  “Hell is paved with good intentions,” the proverb says; and the enormous proportion of bad successes in this life lie between the desire and the execution.  Give us a man who is able to do what he settles that he desires to do, and we have the one thing indispensable.  If he can succeed doing ill, much more he can succeed doing well.  Show him better, and, at any rate, there is a chance that he will do better.