Thus armed at all points, incapable of being either surprised or exhausted, courage achieves results which seem miraculous.  It is an element of inspiration, something superadded and incalculable, when all the other forces are exhausted.  When we consider how really formidable becomes the humblest of quadrupeds, cat or rat, when it grows mad and desperate and throws all personal fear behind, it is clear that there must be a reserved power in human daring which defies computation and equalizes the most fearful odds.  Take one man, mad with excitement or intoxication, place him with his back to the wall, a knife in his hand, and the fire of utter frenzy in his eyes,—­and who, among the thousand bystanders, dares make the first attempt to disarm him?  Desperate courage makes one a majority.  Baron Trenck nearly escaped from the fortress of Glatz at noonday, snatching a sword from an officer, passing all the sentinels with a sudden rush, and almost effecting his retreat to the mountains; “which incident will prove,” he says, “that adventurous and even rash daring will render the most improbable undertakings successful, and that desperate attempts may often make a general more fortunate and famous than the wisest and best-concerted plans.”

It is this miraculous quality which helps to explain the extraordinary victories of history:  as where the army of Lucullus at Tigranocerta slew one hundred thousand barbarians with the loss of only a hundred men,—­or where Cortes conquered Mexico with six hundred foot and sixteen horse.  The astounding narratives in the chivalry romances, where the historian risks his Palmerin or Amadis as readily against twenty giants as one, secure of bringing him safely through,—­or the corresponding modern marvels of Alexandre Dumas,—­seem scarcely exaggerations of actual events.  A Portuguese, at the siege of Goa, inserted a burning match in a cask of gunpowder, then grasped it in his arms, and, crying to his companions, “Stand aside, I bear my own and many men’s lives,” threw it among the enemy, of whom a hundred were killed by the explosion, the bearer being left unhurt.  John Haring, on a Flemish dyke, held a thousand men at bay, saved his army, and finally escaped uninjured.  And the motto of Bayard, Vires agrainis unus habet, was given him after singly defending a bridge against two hundred Spaniards.  Such men appear to bear charmed lives, and to be identical with the laws of Fate.  “What a soldier, what a Roman, was thy father, my young bride!  How could they who never saw him have discoursed so rightly upon virtue?”

From popular want of faith in these infinite resources of daring, it is a common thing for persons of eminent courage to be stigmatized as rash.  This has been strikingly the case, for instance, in modern times, with the Marquis of Wellesley and Sir Charles Napier.  When the Duke of Wellington was in the Peninsula in 1810, the City of London addressed the throne, protesting against the bestowal of “honorable distinctions upon a general who had thus far exhibited, with equal rashness and ostentation, nothing but an useless valor.”