This axiom tains a principle of pensation which disposes us to admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to diaries and definitions. We should more willingly fall in with this popular language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour -- in the same vocabulary. The ic writers, with their poetical justice, have tributed not a little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hect fellow exposed aen upoage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some peoples share of animal spirits is notoriously low aive. It has not strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no art of valour. The truest ce with them is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But front one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his fiden the theory quickly vanishes. Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest inoffensive deportment does not [p 253] necessarily imply valour; her does the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hi wanted modesty -- we do not mean him of Clarissa -- but who ever doubted his ce? Even the poets -- upon whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be most binding -- have thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the "Agonistes," is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him -- and does it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into this kind of character thaher of his predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort of dimidiate preeminence: -- " Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true distributive justice.