retains in certain relations the more external

meaning.

As some of the best things become by perversion the worst, - their very virtues giving a virulent potency to poisons, the life-sustaining air itself carrying when foul the largest freight of death, -so honor, whose name is a promise of purity and elevation, is liable to such warp and debasement, as to be turned into a shield of vice and be forced to entwine itself defensively even around dishonor. The sovereignty of self, not duly tempered, grows despotic from narrowness and blind from despotism, and, mistaking its own will for light, decrees brown to be white and foul fair, half-believing its own decree. Men who have betrayed weighty trusts, and made shipwreck of honesty, cling with a wild, semi-dubious defiance to honor, or rather to the name, and challenge its protection, with the same right as a pirate would that of a great nation's flag that he had flung out from his topmast in the agony of defeat. Even the blackleg and the libertine strive by help of it to piece out their rags into a dress-suit, and boldly wielding the remnant of self-respect - which is divinely left, as a nest-egg of regeneration, even to the most abandoned - impose on many people with what Coleridge calls "the ghost of virtue deceased."

The point of honor is a shifting point, varying in fervor and changing its place, according to age and country. In the darker, less stable times it is most vivid, and has been especially sparkling and active among the "proud Spaniards," thus revealing, that it is hatched in the beetling eyries of pride. If too long and closely it haunts the rocky region of its birth, it grows fantastical and tyrannical and impracticable, and will lead him, who follows it too far, into ugly falls. Like the pharos-flame, it may help you through a night-tempest on a dangerous coast; but its sole function is, to apprise you where you are, leaving to your inward resources to work out a safety. If reason and principle are weak or overruled, not only will it have no power to save you, but a jack-o'-lantern will be taken for a beacon, and even honorable men - misled by the partialities and sinuosities of self- may be betrayed, by the very point of honor, into wrongfulness and crime.

Longer and more numerous than were the roads out of Imperial Rome, are the lines whereof a cultivated Christian is the centre, lines that connect him with his neighbors and those mentally akin, and then, running to all corners of the civilized world, lose themselves in the infinite and eternal. He is a fixed centre, without definite circumference, but with radii innumerable, that are the chords whereon play the magnetic currents of life; and according to the messages which they carry or bring, are a man's gains or losses, joys or sorrows, improvement or declension, exaltation or humiliation.

His personality is the pivot of each man's life. By the qualities that have become associated with and the individuals who have most illustrated it, the term gentleman implies an elevated, purified personality, and therewith a constancy and manliness which, whether or not they be exhibited in government of others, import a steadfast command over one's self. The motions of a gentleman should be self-ruled with a smooth regality of will. These magnetic currents therefore should, on arriving to or issuing from him, be commingled with and controlled by a virile, individual virtue, which at once beautifies and intensifies their life. A healthy gentlemanhood makes of the heart a centre so vivid, that it throws off or consumes all hurtful influences.

We have called honor the essence of noble selfhood, a central feeling, sterling and subtle, that has its birth in self-regard, that looks solely to itself for worth and preservation. On the other hand, the word honors, in the plural, means a something that comes from abroad, that depends upon outward opinion and decision. A man of honor may not be a man of honors; though true to his best self, he may not be, nor desire to be, the object of conspicuous public consideration. His neighbor, though not a man of honor, has honors heaped upon him, achieving and valuing an outward reputation and its fruits. Well is it and significant, that one word expresses such diverse, even opposite, things, their union being needed to the consummation of character; for, a due regard for general opinion, a sus ceptibility to censure or approval, if inwoven with a full self-estimation, enlarges and supplies without weakening the individuality. Equilibrium between them produces a graceful strength, and the man is more comfortable to himself as well as to others of whom it is not said that he is proud or he is vain.

Pride isolates: vanity diffuses. Pride is self-satisfied: vanity reaches self-satisfaction through extraneous satisfaction. Pride is direct: vanity is circuitous. Pride can array itself in the dark: vanity must have a looking-glass. Pride gives his stately gait to the Arab: vanity puts paint on the tawny skin of the Sioux warrior, - and on the fair, feminine skin of tribes that live on the Hudson River. A product of vanity is Fashion, which is indeed a conglomerate of vanities, wherein is sparsely intermingled the grit and more often the scoria of pride.