the cheek its glistening glow, its captivating bloom. But the esthetic element, if not primary in the gentleman of the highest type, is essential to him, and is of such significance in gentlemanhood, that in that of any type below the highest it becomes predominant, as will hereafter be seen. We learn from their record that both Bayard and Sidney were imbued with its spirit. Sidney was a poet with his pen, and Bayard, had his education been liberal, might have been one, too; for the lives of both were poetry in action. History would not have gloried in them as she does, we should not be busied with them now, had they not carried in their breasts that eager, insatiate longing for the better, which, being a flame that heats the feelings into their widest swing, lifts purity into grandeur, goodness into magnanimity, truth into heroism, faith into martyrdom. Through a scrutiny of these two protagonists of gentlemanhood, we get an insight which justifies already certain positions, positive and t negative. The gentleman is built from within outward: for the thorough building there must lie ready stores of largeness and bounteousness: a man of small soul can only be a gentleman in a superficial sense: whatever station he may inherit, with whatever varnish of manners he may glisten, against one intensely selfish, gentlemanhood is closed: the genuine gentleman must possess a good degree of moral freedom; for only this can furnish the illumination to lead the footsteps up from the dark ways of the petty self: the gentleman robes manliness in courtesy. Sidney and Bayard, standing emblazoned on high, historic pedestals, are enlarged by the dusk of distance. Champions of an age which the imagination has permanently colored with beauties and grandeurs and marvels, they wear an ideal magnificence, and assume to our eyes heroic stature. For the gold-grasping, steamdriven nineteenth century they may seem not to be available exemplars. But the best there is in life looks always impracticable until performed; and even then its proportions are not completely appropriated by witnessing contemporaries; and only when time has removed it, do later generations acknowledge its dues, investing it at last with entire glory, and sometimes with lineaments mythological. In the great acts that issue freshly out of what is noblest in our nature, there is an infiniteness of good, a boundlessness of power, which need the imaginative vision fully to compass and even to behold. Nor can the imagination, creative as it is, forerun or anticipate them. A moment before the act of handing the cup to the dying soldier, not a by-stander could have predicted it, -it was as yet a latent ideal. The moment after, it was a lesson to humanity for all time, - a sudden flame blazing forth from the divine there is in man, and destined forever to attest and to warm that indwelling divinity. III. CHARLES LAMB GEORGE IV. - PRINCES. believe that, us not be too diffident to LET wearing other costumes, wielding other weapons, there are still Bayards and Sidneys around us. To nourish this belief, we will recall the living days of one, who, if not quite of our generation, is, through his contemporaneous biographers, as minutely known as our familiar companions, whose life, in its daily, superficial struggles and labors, was as commonplace and homely as that of the dullest of his plodding neighbors; and in whom there was such rare capacity of heroism and tenderness and beauty, that his character, still more than even his exquisite writings, is an abiding joy and fortification to all, whose souls have any affinity with self-devotion, any susceptivity to refinement. Charles Lamb, born in London in 1775, was the son of a servant, who, during an almost lifelong service, so won the esteem and affection of his employer, Mr. Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, that this gentleman obtained for his son Charles a presentation to Christ's Hospital, - a high, richly-endowed Charity-School, founded by Edward VI. Here, the associate of Coleridge, Lamb remained from his eighth to his fifteenth year. At seventeen he obtained a subordinate clerkship, with slender salary, in the East India House, where he continued, rising in rank and pay, until his fiftieth year, when he was allowed to retire on a liberal pension, which he enjoyed for ten years, and of which, by another act of liberality on the part of the Directors of the East India Company, his sister had the benefit, they according to her after his death the portion that would have been due to a wife. |