the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and
perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful
Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is
still in his counting-house counting out his money; and
doubtless this is a consideration. But we have, on the other
hand, some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high races
and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side,
and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog.
It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such
sayings with their proverbs. According to the latter, every
lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your
umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser
flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so
long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money
matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man.

It is a still more difficult consideration for our
average men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down
to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated
the same ideal of manners, caution, and respectability, those
characters in history who have most notoriously flown in the
face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms of
praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of
our commercial centres. This is very bewildering to the moral
sense. You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and
reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a-
colonelling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, against the
enemies of France; surely a melancholy example for one's
daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered
America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent