they the chance; to see what fantastic tricks before high heaven
men and women like themselves can play, and how they play them.

Well, it is not for me to judge, for me to blame. I will only say
that there are those who cannot read sensational novels, or,
indeed, any novels at all, just because they see so many
sensational novels being enacted round them in painful facts of
sinful flesh and blood. There are those, too, who have looked in
the mirror too often to wish to see their own disfigured visage in
it any more; who are too tired of themselves and ashamed of
themselves to want to hear of people like themselves; who want to
hear of people utterly unlike themselves, more noble, and able,
and just, and sweet, and pure; who long to hear of heroism and to
converse with heroes; and who, if by chance they meet with an
heroic act, bathe their spirits in that, as in May-dew, and feel
themselves thereby, if but for an hour, more fair.

If any such shall chance to see these words, let me ask them to
consider with me that one word Hero, and what it means.

Hero; Heroic; Heroism. These words point to a phase of human
nature, the capacity for which we all have in ourselves, which is
as startling and as interesting in its manifestations as any, and
which is always beautiful, always ennobling, and therefore always
attractive to those whose hearts are not yet seared by the world
or brutalised by self-indulgence.

But let us first be sure what the words mean. There is no use
talking about a word till we have got at its meaning. We may use
it as a cant phrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate