Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH
more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett, the Success-
ful Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while
the other is still in his counting-house counting out
his money ; and doubtless this is a consideration.
But we have, on the other hand, some bold and
magnanimous sayings common to high races and
natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing
side, and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than
a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the medio-
crities reconcile such sayings with their proverbs.
According to the latter, every lad who goes to sea
is an egregious ass ; never to forget your umbrella
through a long life would seem a higher and wiser
flight of achievement than to go smiling to the
stake ; and so long as you are a bit of a coward,
and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the whole
duty of man.
It is a still more difficult consideration for our
average men, that while all their teachers, from
Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin and the un-
godly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal of
manners, caution, and respectability, those characters
in history who have most notoriously flown in the
face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical
terms of praise, and honoured with public monu-
ments in the streets of our commercial centres.
This is very bewildering to the moral sense. You
have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest
and reputable livelihood under the eyes of her
parents, to go a-colonelling, in the company of
rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France ; surely
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