Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. LlICESTSR — IIASIPBKX — WASHINGTON — NiPOLEON — Si. PAtTL. AN the other hand, men who do not inherit, but by active ability earn, prominent positions, are apt to be coarse and greedy; and so, the highest gentleman is by no means always found in the highest place. Eminences, civil and ecclesiastical, and even military, are too often the prizes of much more self-seeking and stirring worldliness than are consistent with the best type of gentlemanhood. Bayard was to the end of his long career a subordinate,—he who ought to have been a generalissimo at thirty, and would, had he been more selfish (but then he had not been Bayard), and less modest; for a great power in the world, but one incompatible with the purest gentle- manliness, is impudence, which is a compound of equal parts of self-confidence and unscru- pulousness.—Sidney, although young when hefell at Zutphen, was better fitted for command than he under whom he served, his uncle, the unprincipled worldling, Leicester, who, with all his birth and rank and magnificence, was as far from high gentlemanhood as the most abject of his valets. — Hampden was a man and a gentleman of the largest and finest mould, humane and intrepid, wise and refined, always kindly, always resolute, with a broad, far- seeing intellect at the command of feelings as warm as they were pure, as tempered as they were strong, — a man full of dutifulness and heroism, with " a flowing courtesy to all men." — A supreme gentleman was Washington, raised to the front of the world by the grand necessities of a sublime historical epoch. — Napoleon was a sublime snob. Napoleon's mind was swollen with the virus of vulgar ambition. His moral nature, originally cold and meagre, grew blotched as he advanced, festering with the lust of power and its subservien...