Meantime, whatever may be thought of a sudden death as a mere variety in the modes of dying, where death in some shape is inevitable—­a question which, equally in the Roman and the Christian sense, will be variously answered according to each man’s variety of temperament—­certainly, upon one aspect of sudden death there can be no opening for doubt, that of all agonies incident to man it is the most frightful, that of all martyrdoms it is the most freezing to human sensibilities—­namely, where it surprises a man under circumstances which offer (or which seem to offer) some hurried and inappreciable chance of evading it.  Any effort, by which such an evasion can be accomplished, must be as sudden as the danger which it affronts.  Even that, even the sickening necessity for hurrying in extremity where all hurry seems destined to be vain, self-baffled, and where the dreadful knell of too late is already sounding in the ears by anticipation—­even that anguish is liable to a hideous exasperation in one particular case, namely, where the agonising appeal is made not exclusively to the instinct of self-preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf of another life besides your own, accidentally cast upon your protection.  To fail, to collapse in a service merely your own, might seem comparatively venial; though, in fact, it is far from venial.  But to fail in a case where Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands the final interests of another—­of a fellow-creature shuddering between the gates of life and death; this, to a man of apprehensive conscience, would mingle the misery of an atrocious criminality with the misery of a bloody calamity.  The man is called upon, too probably, to die; but to die at the very moment when, by any momentary collapse, he is self-denounced as a murderer.  He had but the twinkling of an eye for his effort, and that effort might, at the best, have been unavailing; but from this shadow of a chance, small or great, how if he has recoiled by a treasonable lachete?  The effort might have been without hope; but to have risen to the level of that effort, would have rescued him, though not from dying, yet from dying as a traitor to his duties.

The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far down in the depths of human nature.  It is not that men generally are summoned to face such awful trials.  But potentially, and in shadowy outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men’s natures—­muttering under ground in one world, to be realized perhaps in some other.  Upon the secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly projected at intervals, perhaps, to every one of us.  That dream, so familiar to childhood, of meeting a lion, and, from languishing prostration in hope and vital energy, that constant sequel of lying down before him, publishes the secret frailty of human nature—­reveals its deep-seated Pariah falsehood to itself—­records its