Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on
railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger;
and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me.
Our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, would
sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite slave into the
foundations of their palace. It was with his own life that my
companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper
single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up
early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear-
wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In
that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of
courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and
doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love
also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he
succeeded. But he died, and his paper died after him; and of all
this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes
as if there had come literally nothing.
These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under
the mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former
secretary. We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial and
thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and have no
more behind one than Macbean.
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