Some would nowadays use that story merely to prove that the monkey’s nature and the man’s nature are, after all, one and the same. Well: I, at least, have never denied that there is a monkey-nature in man, as there is a peacock-nature, and a swine-nature, and a wolf-nature—of all which four I see every day too much. The sharp and stern distinction between men and animals, as far as their natures are concerned, is of a more modern origin than people fancy. Of old the Assyrian took the eagle, the ox, and the lion—and not unwisely—as the three highest types of human capacity. The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep for their master’s death. The animals and monsters of Greek myth—like the Ananzi spider of Negro fable—glide insensibly into speech and reason. Birds—the most wonderful of all animals in the eyes of a man of science or a poet—are sometimes looked on as wiser, and nearer to the gods, than man. The Norseman—the noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whom history can tell us—was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native forests that he had “ten men’s strength and eleven men’s wisdom.” How could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages and since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem—that the actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by passions but too exactly like those of the lower animals? I have said, and say again, with good old Vaughan: Unless above himself he can Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man. But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many a sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted the monkey’s heroism from quite a different point of view; and would have said that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some “divine afflatus”—an expression quite as philosophical and quite as intelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read nowadays—and had been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfish monkey-nature, just as man requires to be raised above his. But that theory belongs to a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion, and which will have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion again. And now, if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, I must protest against the use of the word “sacrifice” which is growing too common in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an “enormous sacrifice of life;” an expression which means merely that a great many poor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for no purpose whatsoever; no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons of ignorance, cupidity, or mismanagement. The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words, who, when asked, “In what sense might Charles the First be said to be a martyr?” answered, “In the same sense that a man might be said to be a martyr to the gout.”