This kind of manhood is, perhaps, rather a fashion than a personal quality:  a way of carrying the stick, of wearing, or not wearing, the hair; it resides in the twirl of the moustache, or the cut of the trouser; you must seek it in the quality of the boot and the shape of the hat rather than in the actions of the wearer.

Take that matter of the hair.  When next the street-boy sorrowfully exclaims on your passing that ’it’s no wonder the barbers all ’list for soldiers,’ or some puny idiot at your club—­a lilliputian model of popular ’manhood’—­sniggers to his friend behind his coffee as you come in:  call to mind pictures of certain brave ‘tailed men’ of old, at the winking of whose eyelid your tiny club ‘man’ would have expired on the instant.  Threaten him with a Viking.  Show him in a vision a band of blue-eyed pirates, with their wild hair flying in the breeze, as they sternly hasten across the Northern Sea.  Summon Godiva’s lord, ’his beard a yard before him, and his hair a yard behind.’  Call up the brave picture of Rupert’s love-locked Cavaliers, as their glittering column hurls like a bolt of heaven to the charge, or Nelson’s pig-tailed sailors in Trafalgar’s Bay.  But, before you have gone half-way through your panorama, that club-mannikin will have hastily departed, leaving his coffee half-drunk, and you shall find him airing his manhood in the security of the billiard-room.

Yes, for us who are denied the admiration of the billiard-marker; denied the devotion of the barmaid (with charming paradox so-called); for us who make poor braggarts, and often prefer to surrender rather than to elbow for our rights; for us who deliver our opinions with mean-spirited diffidence, and are men of quiet voices and ways:  for us there is hope.  It may be that to love one’s neighbour is also a part of manhood, to suffer quietly for another as true a piece of bravery as to fell him for a careless word; it may be that purity, constancy, and reverence are as sure criteria of manhood as their opposites.  It may be, I say; but be certain that a strong beard, a harsh voice, and a bull-dog physiognomy are surer still.

THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMAN

Have you ever remarked as a curious thing that, whereas every day we hear women sighing because they have not been born men, you never hear a sigh blowing in the other direction?  I only know one man who had the courage to say that he would not mind exchanging into the female infantry, and it may have been affectation on his part.  At any rate, he blushed deeply at the avowal, and his friends look askance at him ever since.  Of course, the obvious answer of the self-satisfied male is that he is the lord of creation, that his is the better part which shall not be taken from him.  Yet this does not prevent his telling his wife sometimes, when oppressed with the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches, that ’it is nice to