Again, the mere quality of caution is often mistaken for cowardice, while heedlessness passes for daring.  A late eminent American sculptor, a man of undoubted courage, is said to have always taken the rear car in a railroad train.  Such a spirit of prudence, where well-directed, is to be viewed with respect.  We ought not to reverence the blind recklessness which sits on the safety-valve during a steamboat-race, but the cool composure which neither underrates a danger nor shrinks from it.  The best encomium is that of Malcolm M’Leod upon Charles Edward:—­“He was the most cautious man, not to be a coward, and the bravest man, not to be rash, that I ever saw”; or that of Charles VII. of France upon Pierre d’Aubusson:—­“Never did I see united so much fire and so much wisdom.”

Still again, men vary as to the form of danger which tests them most severely.  The Irish are undoubtedly a brave nation, but their courage is apt to vanish in presence of sickness.  They are not, however, alone in this, if we may judge from the newspaper statements, that, after the recent quarantine riots in New York, a small-pox patient lay all day untended in the Park, because no one dared to go near him.  It is said of Dr. Johnson, that he was a hero against pain, but a coward against death.  Probably the contrary emotion is quite as common.  To a believer in immortality, death, even when premature, can scarcely be regarded as an unmitigated evil, but pain enforces its own recognition.  We can hardly agree with the frightened recruit in the farce, who thinks “Victory or Death” a forbidding war-cry, but “Victory or Wooden Legs” a more appetizing alternative.

Beside these complications, there are those arising from the share which conscience has in the matter.  “Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just,” and the most resolute courage will sometimes quail in a bad cause, and even die in its armor, like Bois-Guilbert.  It was generally admitted, on both sides, in Kansas, that the “Border Ruffians” seldom dared face an equal number; yet nobody asserted that these men were intrinsically deficient in daring; it was only conscience which made cowards of them all.

But it is, after all, the faculty of imagination which, more than all else, confuses the phenomena of courage and cowardice.  A very imaginative child is almost sure to be reproached with timidity, while mere stolidity takes rank as courage.  The bravest boy may sometimes be most afraid of the dark, or of ghosts, or of the great mysteries of storms and the sea.  Even the mighty Charlemagne shuddered when the professed enchanter brought before him the vast forms of Dietrich and his Northern companions, on horseback.  We once saw a party of boys tested by an alarm which appealed solely to the imagination.  The only one among them who stood the test was the most cowardly of the group, who escaped the contagion through sheer lack of this faculty.  Any imaginative person can occasionally test this on himself by sleeping in a large lonely house, or by bathing alone in some solitary place by the great ocean; there comes a thrill which is not born of terror, and the mere presence of a child breaks the spell,—­though it would only enhance the actual danger, if danger there were.