Sometimes, however, I am inclined to a more comfortable consideration of this great question—­for it is one of my weaknesses to be positive on few matters.  But to-day I taunted my soul with its unmanliness till it rose in rebellion against me.  ‘Poor-spirited creature,’ I said, ’where is thy valour?  When a fool has struck thee I have seen thee pass on without a word, not so much as a momentary knitting of thy fist When ignorance has waxed proud, and put thee to the mock, thou hast sat meek, and uttered never a word.  It must needs be thou art pigeon-livered and lack gall!  There is not in thee the swagger, the rustle, the braggadocio of a true swashbuckler manhood.  Out on thee!’

And my soul took the blows in patience.

‘Hast thou any courage hid in any crevice of thee?’ I continued my taunt.  And suddenly my soul answered with a firm quiet voice:  ‘Try me!’

Then said I, ’Coward as thou art, fearful of thy precious skin, darest thou strike a blow for the weak against his oppressor, darest thou meet the strong tyrant in the way?’

And thereon I was startled, for my soul suddenly sprang up within me, and, lo! it neighed like a war-horse for the battle.

‘Ah!’ I continued, ’but couldst thou fight against the enemy of thy land?  Surely thy valour would melt at the clash of swords and the voice of the drum?’

And the answer of my soul was like the march of armed men.

Then said I softly, for I was touched by this unwonted valour of my soul,
‘Soul! wouldst thou die for thy friend?’

And the voice of my soul came sweet as the sound of bells at evening.  It seemed, indeed, as though it could dream of naught sweeter than to die for one’s friend.

This colloquy of inner and outer set me further reflecting.  Can it be that this manhood is, after all, rather a quality of the spirit than of the body; that it is to be sought rather in the stout heart than in the strong arm; that big words and ready blows may, like a display of bunting, betoken no true loyalty, and be but the gaudy sign to a sorry inn?  Dr. Watts, it may be remembered, declared the mind to be the standard of the man.  As he was the author of a book on ‘The Human Mind,’ envious persons may meanly conceive that his statement was but a subtly-disguised advertisement of his literary wares.

    ’Were I so tall to reach the Pole,
      Or grasp the ocean in my span,
    I must be measured by my soul: 
      The mind’s the standard of the man.’

The fact of Dr. Watts being also a man of low stature does not affect the truth or untruth of this fine verse, which may serve to comfort many.  One may assume that it was Jack, and not the giant, whom we would need to describe as the true man of the two; and one seems to have heard of some ‘fine,’ ‘manly’ fellows, darlings of the football field and the American bar, whose actions somehow have not altogether justified those epithets, or, at any rate, certain readings of them.  Theirs is a manhood, one fancies, that is given to shine more at race-meetings and in hotel parlours than at home—­revealed to the barmaid, and strangely hidden from the wife, who, indeed, has less opportunities for perceiving it.