Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 37

436 MS TEIPLEX.
him with a single mind. No one surely could have recoiled with more
heartache and terror from the thought of death than our delightful
lexicographer ; and yet we know how little it affected his conduct, how
wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he
spoke of life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour ;
and his heart, hound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven
individual cups of tea. As courage and intelligence are the two quali-
ties best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelli-
gence to recognise our precarious estate in life, and the first part of
courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat
headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in
maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well armoured for
this world.
And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a
good citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing ; there
is nothing so cruel as panic ; the man who has least fear for his own
carcase, has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who
took his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk,
had all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own
digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like
a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous
acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually ; he develops a fancy for
parlours with a regulated temperature, and takes his morality on the
principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or
soul becomes so engi-ossing, that all the noises of the outer world begin
to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature ;
and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain. To be over-
wise is to ossify ; and the scruple-monger ends by standing steckstill.
Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling
weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly
used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the
world, keeps all his jjiilses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he
runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he
may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after
his health. Lord have a care of his soul, says he ; and he has at the key
of the position, and swashes through peril and incongruity towards his
aim. Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on
all sides of us ; the nastiest chances pop out against him ; mim-mouthed
friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod
about his path : and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover of
living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside,
he mvist, like any other soldier, in any other stii-ring, deadly warfare,
push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. " A jieerage or West-
minster Abbey ! " cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner.
These are great incentives ; not for any of these, but for the plain satis-
faction of living, of being about their business in some sort or other, do