Characters and characteristics in literature; English literature
Valour is a 'virtue in the spirit which keeps the flesh in subjection,
resolves without fear, and travails without fainting: she vows no
villainy nor breaks her fidelity: she is patient in captivity and
pitiful in conquest. Her gain is honour and desert her mean, fortune her
scorn and folly her hate; wisdom is her guide and conquest her grace,
clemency her praise and humility her glory: she is youth's ornament and
age's honour, nature's blessing and virtue's love. Her life is
resolution and her love victory, her triumph truth, and her fame virtue.
Her arms are from antiquity and her coat full of honour, where the title
of grace hath her heraldry from heaven. She makes a walk of war and a
sport of danger, an ease of labour and a jest of death: she makes famine
but abstinence, want but a patience, sickness but a purge, and death a
puff. She is the maintainer of war, the general of an army, the terror
of an enemy, and the glory of a camp. She is the nobleness of the mind
and the strength of the body, the life of hope and the death of fear.
With a handful of men she overthrows a multitude, and with a sudden
amazement she discomfits a camp. She is the revenge of wrong and the
defence of right, religion's champion and virtue's choice. In brief, let
this suffice in her commendation:--She strengthened David and conquered
Goliath, she overthrows her enemies and conquers herself.
RESOLUTION.
Resolution is the honour of valour, in the quarrel of virtue, for the
defence of right and redress of wrong. She beats the march, pitcheth the
battle, plants the ordnance, and maintains the fight. Her ear is stopped
for dissuasions, her eye aims only at honour, her hand takes the sword
of valour, and her heart thinks of nothing but victory. She gives the
charge, makes the stand, assaults the fort, and enters the breach. She
breaks the pikes, faceth the shot, damps the soldier, and defeats the
army. She loseth no time, slips no occasion, dreads no danger, and cares
for no force. She is valour's life and virtue's love, justice's honour
and mercy's glory. She beats down castles, fires ships, wades through
the sea, and walks through the world. She makes wisdom her guide and
will her servant, reason her companion and honour her mistress. She is a
blessing in Nature and a beauty in reason, a grace in invention and a
glory in action. She studies no plots when her platform is set down, and
defers no time when her hour is prefixed. She stands upon no helps when
she knows her own force, and in the execution of her will she is a rock
irremovable. She is the king's will without contradiction, and the
judge's doom without exception, the scholar's profession without
alteration, and the soldier's honour without comparison. In sum, so many
are the grounds of her grace and the just causes of her commendation,
that, leaving her worth to the description of better wits, I will in
these few words conclude my conceit of her:--She is the stoutness of the
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