But if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to
Plutarch,[326] who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the
Brasidas,[327] the Dion,[328] the Epaminondas,[329] the Scipio[330] of
old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all
the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the
despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A
wild courage, a Stoicism[331] not of the schools, but of the blood,
shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.

3. We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books of
political science, or of private economy. Life is a festival only to
the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a
ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by
our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The
disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural,
intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to
breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man's head back to
his heels, hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes,
insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine
indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by
human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily,
almost no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some
amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a
share in the expiation.

4. Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let
him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the
commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go
dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected, and neither
defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and