of all animals in the eyes of a man of science or a poet—­are sometimes looked on as wiser, and nearer to the gods, than man.  The Norseman—­the noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whom history can tell us—­was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native forests that he had “ten men’s strength and eleven men’s wisdom.”  How could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages and since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem—­that the actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by passions but too exactly like those of the lower animals?  I have said, and say again, with good old Vaughan—­

      “Unless above himself he can
   Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man.”

But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many a sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted the monkey’s heroism from quite a different point of view; and would have said that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some “divine afflatus”—­an expression quite as philosophical and quite as intelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read now-a-days—­and had been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfish monkey-nature, just as man requires to be raised above his.  But that theory belongs to a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion, and which will have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion again.

And now:  if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, I must protest against a use of the word sacrifice which is growing too common in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an “enormous sacrifice of life;” an expression which means merely that a great many poor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for no purpose whatsoever:  no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons of ignorance, cupidity or mismanagement.

The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words, who, when asked, “In what sense might Charles the First be said to be a martyr?” answered, “In the same sense that a man might be said to be a martyr to the gout.”

And I must protest, in like wise, against a misuse of the words hero, heroism, heroic, which is becoming too common, namely, applying them to mere courage.  We have borrowed the misuse, I believe, as we have more than one beside, from the French press.  I trust that we shall neither accept it, nor the temper which inspires it.  It may be convenient for those who flatter their nation, and especially the military part of it, into a ruinous self-conceit, to frame some such syllogism as this—­“Courage is heroism:  every Frenchman is naturally courageous:  therefore every Frenchman is a hero.”  But we, who have been trained at once in a sounder school of morals, and in a greater respect for facts, and for language as the expression of facts, shall be careful, I hope, not to trifle thus with that potent and awful