"The saint, whose martyrdom will make the gallows glorious like the
cross!" exclaimed the Massachusetts sage and seer.
Froude's reflections upon the death of John Davis, the navigator, one of
England's Forgotten Worthies, may well be applied to John Brown: "A
melancholy end for such a man--the end of a warrior, not dying
Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in a poor brawl or
ambuscade. Life with him was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice
offered up to duty, and what his Master sent was welcome." It was "hard,
rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life
of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this
side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is
won; and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of man.
Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has
been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do the really
highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or
Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings,
slaves--one and all, their fate has been the same: the same bitter cup
has been given to them to drink."
"Whether on the scaffold high,
Or in the battle's van,
The fittest place where man can die
Is where he dies for man."
V.
REWARDS.
The Bishop of Llandaff was standing in the House of Lords, in company
with Lords Thurlow and Loughborough, when Lord Southampton accosted him:
"I want your advice, my lord; how am I to bring up my son so as to make
him get forward in the world?" "I know of but one way," replied the
bishop; "give him parts and poverty." Poussin, being shown a picture by
a person of rank, remarked, "You only want a little poverty, sir, to
make you a good painter."
"The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with
the heir." Yet, says Froude, "The man who with no labor of his own has
inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his father
who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest
pedigree, and are therefore the farthest removed from the first who made
the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest. The nearer to
the fountain, the fouler the stream; and that first ancestor, who has
soiled his fingers by labor, is no better than a parvenu."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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