Note 36 — THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

There is a common inversion of this opinion, which is desperation; or the becoming reckless of all consequences, poverty, disease, or death, from disappointment in some one thing that the mind is set upon, no matter what. A man who has been jilted of his first choice marries out of spite the first woman he meets. A girl, whose sweetheart goes to sea, because she will not have him, as soon as he is gone, and she is baulked of her fancy, runs a-muck at ruin and infamy—

‘As men should serve a cucumber,

She throws herself away!’

Losing gamesters act nearly on the same infatuated principle. Harrel, in Cecilia, makes a fine hair-brained mock-heroic exit. I declare I prefer it to the termination of Gray’s Bard. Gamesters and highwaymen are so far heroes that it is neck or nothing with them: they set consequences at defiance. Their actions are disinterested; but their motives are not so. A fortune-hunting General stands much in the same predicament. The abstracted, the ideal, is necessary to the true heroic. But before a man can fight for an idea, he must have an idea in his head to fight for. Now there are some Generals that are not understood to possess this qualification of the heroic character.