as a rule is, the most cheerful of fellows, doing his duty in the trench or the storm, dying when the bullet comes, but living like a hero the while.  Look, for instance, at the whole-hearted cheerfulness of Raleigh, when with his small English ships he cast himself against the navies of Spain; or at Xenophon, conducting back from an inhospitable and hostile country, and through unknown paths, his ten thousand Greeks; or Caesar, riding up and down the banks of the Rubicon, sad enough belike when alone, but at the head of his men cheerful, joyous, well dressed, rather foppish, in fact, his face shining with good humor as with oil.  Again, Nelson, in the worst of dangers, was as cheerful as the day.  He had even a rough but quiet humor in him just as he carried his coxswain behind him to bundle the swords of the Spanish and French captains under his arm.  He could clap his telescope to his blind eye, and say, “Gentlemen, I can not make out the signal,” when the signal was adverse to his wishes, and then go in and win, in spite of recall.  Fancy the dry laughs which many an old sea-dog has had over that cheerful incident.  How the story lights up the dark page of history!  Then there was Henry of Navarre, lion in war, winner of hearts, bravest of the brave, who rode down the ranks at Ivry when Papist and Protestant were face to face, when more than his own life and kingdom were at stake, and all the horrors of religious war were loosened and unbound, ready to ravage poor, unhappy France.  That beaming, hopeful countenance won the battle, and is a parallel to the brave looks of Queen Elizabeth when she cheered her Englishmen at Tilbury.

But we are not all soldiers or sailors, although, too, our Christian profession hath adopted the title of soldiers in the battle of life.  It is all very well to cite great commanders who, in the presence of danger, excited by hope, with the eyes of twenty thousand men upon them, are cheerful and happy; but what is that to the solitary author, the poor artist, the governess, the milliner, the shoemaker, the factory-girl, they of the thousand persons in profession or trade who are given to murmur, and who think life so hard and gloomy and wretched that they can not go through it with a smile on their faces and despair in their hearts?  What are examples and citations to them?  “Hecuba!” cries out poor, melancholy, morbid Hamlet, striking on a vein of thought, “what’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?” Much.

We all have trials; but it is certain that good temper and cheerfulness will make us bear them more easily than any thing else.  “Temper,” said one of our bishops, “is nine-tenths of Christianity.”  We do not live now in the Middle Ages.  We can not think that the sect of Flagellants, who whipped themselves till the blood ran into their shoes, and pulled uncommonly long faces, were the best masters of philosophy.  “True godliness is cheerful as the day,” wrote Cowper, himself melancholy-mad enough; and we are to remember that the precept of