Esmond is a man of the first half of the eighteenth century; living in a coarse, drunken, ignorant, profligate, and altogether unheroic age.  He is—­and here the high art and the high morality of Mr. Thackeray’s genius is shown—­altogether a man of his own age.  He is not a sixteenth-century or a nineteenth-century man born out of time.  His information, his politics, his religion, are no higher than of those round him.  His manners, his views of human life, his very prejudices and faults, are those of his age.  The temptations which he conquers are just those under which the men around him fall.  But how does he conquer them?  By holding fast throughout to honour, duty, virtue.  Thus, and thus alone, he becomes an ideal eighteenth-century gentleman, an eighteenth-century hero.  This was what Mr. Thackeray meant—­for he told me so himself, I say—­that it was possible, even in England’s lowest and foulest times, to be a gentleman and a hero, if a man would but be true to the light within him.

But I will go further.  I will go from ideal fiction to actual, and yet ideal, fact; and say that, as I read history, the most unheroic age which the civilized world ever saw was also the most heroic; that the spirit of man triumphed most utterly over his circumstances, at the very moment when those circumstances were most against him.

How and why he did so is a question for philosophy in the highest sense of that word.  The fact of his having done so is matter of history.  Shall I solve my own riddle?

Then, have we not heard of the early Christian martyrs?  Is there a doubt that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, did exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infinite self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; did raise the ideal of human nobleness a whole stage—­rather say, a whole heaven—­higher than before; and that wherever the tale of their great deeds spread, men accepted, even if they did not copy, those martyrs as ideal specimens of the human race, till they were actually worshipped by succeeding generations, wrongly, it may be, but pardonably, as a choir of lesser deities?

But is there, on the other hand, a doubt that the age in which they were heroic was the most unheroic of all ages; that they were bred, lived, and died, under the most debasing of materialist tyrannies, with art, literature, philosophy, family and national life dying or dead around them, and in cities the corruption of which cannot be told for very shame—­cities, compared with which Paris is the abode of Arcadian simplicity and innocence?  When I read Petronius and Juvenal, and recollect that they were the contemporaries of the Apostles; when—­to give an instance which scholars, and perhaps, happily, only scholars, can appreciate—­I glance once more at Trimalchio’s feast, and remember that within a mile of that feast St. Paul may have been preaching to a Christian congregation,