This relentless rebuker of shams furnishes us with a good transition to another department of the subject, namely, moral hardihood, or grit organized in conscience, and applying the most rigorous laws of ethics to the practical affairs of life. Now there is a wide difference between moral men, so called, and men moralized,--between men who lazily adopt and lazily practise the conventional moral proprieties of the time, and men transformed into the image of inexorable, unmerciful moral ideas, men in whom moral maxims appear organized as moral might. There are thousands who are prodigal of moral and benevolent opinions, and honestly eloquent in loud professions of what they would do in case circumstances called upon them to act; but when the occasion is suddenly thrust upon them, when temptation, leering into every corner and crevice of their weak and selfish natures, connects the notion of virtue with the reality of sacrifice, then, in that sharp pinch, they become suddenly apprised of the difference between rhetoric and rectitude, and find that their speeches have been far ahead of their powers of performance. Thus, in one of Gerald Griffin's novels, there is a scene in which a young Irish student, fresh from his scholastic ethics, amazes the company at his father's table, who are all devout believers in the virtues of the hair-trigger, by an eloquent declamation against the folly and the sin of duelling. At last one of the set gets sufficient breath to call him a coward. The hot Irish blood is up in an instant, a tumbler is thrown at the head of the doubter of his courage, and in ten seconds the young moralist is crossing swords with his antagonist in a duel.