that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of
sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio,[343] charged
with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait
for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his
hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates'[344]
condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the
Prytaneum,[345] during his life, and Sir Thomas More's[346]
playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and
Fletcher's "Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his
company,

_Jul._ Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye.

_Master._ Very likely,
'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a
perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything
seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were
the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish
churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of
years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world
behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the
Blue-Laws[347] of the world; and such would appear, could we see the
human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking
together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately
and solemn garb of works and influences.

12. The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a
romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at