Let us turn now to a more attractive quality, courage and, manly daring as exhibited in life and and death, particularly in the "last scene of all." _Finis coranat opus_--the end crowns the work. When Epaminondas asked whether Chabrias, Iphicrates or himself deserved the highest place in the esteem of their fellow-beings, he replied, "You must see us die before that question can be answered." His own exit at Mantinea, in the moment of a glorious victory, was singularly brilliant, and his parting sentiments illustrated the purity of his life. The situation finds an exact parallel in the fall of Gustavus Adolphus, under the same circumstances, at Lutzen. The name of the patriot who seals with blood his devotion to his cause, on a winning field, is encircled with and imperishable halo of glory, the thought of which would stir the pulse of an anchorite. Claverhouse, in Old Mortality, describes the feeling with true military enthusiasm. "It is not," he says, "the expiring pang that is worth thinking of in an event that must happen one day, and may befall us at any moment--it is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun; that is all which is worth caring for, which distinguishes the death of the brave or the ignoble. When I think of death, as a chance of {167} almost hourly occurrence in the course before me, it is in the hope of pressing one day some well-fought and hard-won field of battle, and expiring with the shout of victory in my ear; _that_ would be worth dying for, and more, it would be worth having lived for." And so fell the real Claverhouse on the field of Killiecrankie, and with him vanished the passing gleam of sunshine in the fortunes of the master he served so loyally and well. Had he lived to improve his victory, he would have been in Edinburgh in two or three days, and it is difficult to say what turn the pages of coming history might then have taken. As soon as it was known that he was killed, his army of Highland clans dispersed, and never collected again. They were held together by his single name, and had no faith in any other leader. A heathen poet, Antiphanes, who lived a century earlier than Socrates or his pupil Plato, and five hundred years before the Christian revelation, has a remarkable passage to this effect, of which the following verbal translation is given by Addison in the Spectator: "Grieve not above measure for deceased friends. They are not dead, but have only finished that journey we are all necessitated to take. We ourselves must go to that great place of reception in which they are all of them assembled, and in this general rendezvous of mankind live together in another state of being." Men of the most opposite characters have jested on the point of death. Sir Thomas More, a Christian philosopher, said to the executioner, "Good friend, let me put my beard out of the way, for that has committed no offence against the king."