office was kept in the family in unbroken line of descent; for at least three generations it maintained its position as the first office in the world. The Plantin types and presses and office are still the pride of Antwerp, but the statue of the king's representative, the fierce Duke of Alva, which once dominated a square in the city, and who boasted on the pedestal that he had restored order and preserved religion and reconstructed society, was long ago overthrown. No overthrow could be more complete. It was not merely the upsetting of statue or dynasty, but of the foundations of medieval ideas and principles. Plantin, unwittingly no doubt, but not the less efficiently, did his share in bringing down this thorough destruction. The books which he and others printed aroused the mental activity and inspired the freedom which soon made the Netherlands the foremost state in the world. Kings die and beliefs change; the bronze statues made to be imperishable are destroyed, but the printed word stands. The book lives, and lives forever. Horace was right: it is more enduring than bronze.

In walking through the Museum the eye does not weary of sight-seeing, but the brain does refuse to remember objects that crowd so fast. To remember, one must rest and think of what he has seen. It is a relief to sit down under the cool arcade and look out on the quiet court, and think of the men who trod these stones. For here Plantin and Moretus used to sit in the cool of the day; here they matured plans for great books, and devised means of borrowing money to pay fast-coming obligations. Was the end worth the worry? Behind those latticed windows, obscured with rampant grape-vine leaves, the great Justus

Lipsius wrote or corrected the books that were the admiration of all the universities - books now almost forgotten. In the next room Poelman and Kilianus and Raphelengius plodded like wheel-horses in dragging obscure texts out of the muddy roads in which copyists and compositors had left them. Who thinks of them now? Through that doorway have often passed the courtly Van Dyke and the dashing Rubens, gay in velvets and glittering with jewels. They, at least, are of the immortals. Dignitaries of all classes have been here: patriarchal Jewish rabbis and steeple-crowned Puritans; the ferocious Duke of Alva and the wily Cardinal Granvelle; cowled ecclesiastics from Rome and blackgowned professors from Leyden. From upper windows not far away Plantin's daughters have looked out in terror, on the awful night of the Spanish Fury, as they heard the yells of the savage soldiers raging about the court, and listened to their threats of "blood and flesh and fire," and shuddered at the awful fate that seemed before them. Truly a sad time for the making of books or the cultivation of letters. And even nine years after this, the boy Balthazar must have been stopped at study by the roar of Farnese's guns during that memorable siege, and by the shrieks of the starving defenders of the doomed city.

The evening bell sounds its warning: it is time to go. At our request the obliging concierge gives us a few leaves from the grapevine, and we take our places in the outgoing procession. Out once more in the steaming streets-out in the confused roar and clatter of modern city life. But the memory of the Museum is like that of the chimes of Antwerp's great cathedral-never to be forgotten.

Vol. XXXVI.-35.

FRENCH writer has said that every mistake made in life can be traced to fear. Though this was doubtless written more to shape an epigram than to state a fact, and epigrams are generally regarded as jewels purchased at the expense of veracity, yet the more we reflect upon the remark the more we are impressed with its truth.

Fear, above all things else, enfeebles the vigor of man's actions, supplants decision by vacillation, and opens the road to error. When one seeks counsel of one's fears, judgment ceases to obtrude advice.

Courage, on the other hand, is universally recognized as the manliest of all human attributes; it nerves its possessor for resolute attempts, and equips him for putting forth his supreme efforts. Powerful aristocracies have been founded with courage as the sole patent of nobility; kings have maintained their dynasties with no other virtue to commend them to their subjects. A once popular farce set forth these two opposite traits in human nature under the title of "The nervous man and

the man of nerve."

Courage has so many different natures, assumes so many different forms, and is subject to so many eccentricities, that it is hard to define it. To separate it into the two grand divisions of moral courage and physical courage is a simple matter, but when the subdivisions of these are to be determined, the task is confronted with formidable difficulties.

Few men possess all the various forms of courage. One man may be utterly fearless in the most perilous storm at sea, while on land he may be afraid to travel at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour on a first-class railroad, and, sailor-like, expends his sympathies in pitying "poor unhappy folks ashore." A locomotive engineer on an Eastern railway, who was always selected for his "nerve" when a fast "special" was to be sent out, and whose courage, repeatedly displayed in appalling accidents, had become proverbial, was afraid in the quiet of his own home to go upstairs alone in the dark.

In ascending a Southern river on a steamboat, towards the close of our civil war, we had an officer on board who, during three years of fighting, had treated shot and shell in action with an indifference that made him a

marvel of courage; but on this expedition he manifested a singular fear of torpedoes, put on enough life-preservers to float an anchor, and stood at the stern of the boat ready, at the first sign of danger, to plunge into the water with the promptness of a Baptist convert. He once came very near jumping overboard at the sound of a sudden escape of steam from the boiler. He made no disguise of his nervousness at this new form of danger. I recollect a company officer of infantry who never seemed to know what the word fear meant under any circumstances until his promotion to a higher rank compelled him to mount a horse, and then his mind knew no peace. A sudden snort from the beast alarmed. him more than the opening of a battery, and the pricking up of the animal's ears had more terrors for him than a bayonet charge.

These instances, though numerous, are the exceptions, not the rule. They can often be accounted for by the fact that the victim had suffered a severe fright, perhaps in childhood, which produced a permanent shock to his nerves, and made him timid ever after respecting the particular form of danger to which he had been exposed. An acquaintance of mine whose repeated acts of gallantry in the field had convinced all his comrades that he had been born without the sense of fear was seen to give a wide berth to any horned animals that came in sight. Whenever a drove of commissary's cattle were encountered on the road, he began a series of well-timed maneuvers with a view to getting a fence between himself and them in the shortest possible time. Their approach seemed to demoralize him as much as a cavalry charge of the enemy elated him. The providing of an army with "beef on the hoof" was one of the methods of military logistics which had more terrors for him than a prospect of starvation. When twitted on the subject, he one day said in explanation, that, when a child, a cow had once chased him, thrown him down, and then tossed him on her horns, and he had never recovered from the shock, or been able to banish from his mind the sense of terror the circumstance produced. It was the burned child dreading the fire.

This instinct is common to all animals. At a country station on one of our railways a pig used to be a constant visitor, and drove a thriving business in picking up stray grains of corn which dropped from the bags as they

were loaded on the cars. One day the pig's greed so far overmastered his discretion that his tail got nipped between the brake-shoe and the car-wheel, and when the train started the tail was jerked out by the root. The victim of this sudden catastrophe was now confronted with the dismal prospect of having to navigate through the rest of life with his steering apparatus a total wreck. He continued coming to the station after that, but whenever he heard the clatter of an approaching train, he hurried off to a safe distance and backed up close against a brick wall till the cars had passed; he was never going to permit himself to be subject to the risk of such an indignity again, even though there was no longer any tail left to be pulled out. He had acquired sufficient railroad experience to appreciate the magnitude of the loss of terminal facilities.

As one's physical condition is affected by circumstances of health and sickness, so does one's courage vary under different surroundings. Troops, after being refreshed by a rest and a good meal, have stood their ground under a fire from which they would have fled in confusion if tired and hungry. An empty stomach, like conscience, makes cowards of us all. The Duke of Wellington proved himself a philosopher when he said, " An army moves principally upon its belly." In the days when personal difficulties were settled under the "code," the parties never tried to screw their courage to the sticking-point on empty stomachs, but "pistols and coffee" always went hand in hand.

In the successful attack made by Admiral Du Pont with his fleet upon the Confederate forts which commanded Port Royal harbor, when the dinner hour arrived the admiral directed rations to be served as usual, and the crews were ordered to cease loading their guns and go to loading their stomachs to fortify themselves for the continuation of the battle. The commanding officer was severely criticised for this at the time, but it was afterwards generally conceded that he understood the true relations between the nerves and the stomach, and gained the victory all the sooner by taking time to lodge that dinner where it would do the most good. An attack of dyspepsia or a torpid liver will sometimes rob a man of half his natural courage; rabbits in his path then become magnified into lions, and mole-hills into mountains. Napoleon lost the battle of Leipsic from eating too heavy a dinner and being seized with a fit of the blues brought on by indigestion. As the Latin roots of the word locate the source of courage in the heart, and as the seat of all courage is believed by many to be in the mind, no one would attempt the ungracious and unsenti

mental task of trying to transfer its location to the stomach, but facts point to the belief that the condition of the stomach has something to do even with this high attribute of man.

Courage, like everything else, wears out. Troops used to go into action during our late war displaying a coolness and steadiness the first day that made them seem as if the screeching of shot and shell was the music on which they had been brought up. After fighting a couple of days, their nerves gradually lost their tension, their buoyancy of spirits gave way, and dangers they would have laughed at the first day often sent them panic-stricken to the rear on the third.

It was always a curious sight in camp after a three-days' fight to watch the effect of the sensitiveness of the nerves; men would start at the slightest sound, and dodge at the flight of a bird or a pebble tossed at them. One of the chief amusements on such occasions used to be to throw stones and chips past one another's heads to see the active dodging that would follow.

Recruits sometimes rush into dangers from which veterans would shrink. When Thomas was holding on to his position at Chickamauga on the afternoon of the second day, and resisting charge after charge of an enemy flushed with success, General Granger came up with a division of troops, many of whom had never before been under fire. As soon as they were deployed in front of the enemy, they set up a yell, sprang over the earth-works, charged into his ranks, and created such consternation that the Confederate veterans were paralyzed by the very audacity of such conduct. Granger said, as he watched their movements, "Just look at them; they don't know any better; they think that 's the way it ought to be done. I'll bet they'll never do it again." Men, like children, are often ignorant of danger till they learn its terrors in the school of experience.

Every soldier understands why "two o'clock in the morning" courage is recognized as courage in its highest form. At that time many hours of fasting have occurred since the evening meal; enough sleep has not yet been had to restore the nervous system to its normal condition after the fatigue and excitement of the previous day; it is the hour of darkness and silence, when the mind magnifies the slightest sounds. The stoutest nerves require a great deal of bracing when a camp is startled out of its sleep by an attack at such an hour.

Nearly all persons are more timid when alone. The feeling of lonesomeness is akin to fear. At Spotsylvania a staff officer flinched and turned back when bearing a message to a part of the field which required him to pass

along a road exposed to a short-range fire from the enemy. His courage had stood every test when in the company of others, but on this occasion he had set out alone, and had been seized with a fear which at the time completely unmanned him.

A woman when quite alone in a house at night may be tortured by a sense of fear which completely destroys her peace of mind; but let there be a child in the same room with her, and she will feel but little apprehension of danger. The relief comes not from any protection she believes the child could afford, but from her release from the fearful sense of lonesomeness which had unnerved her.

There is a peculiar significance in "shoulder to shoulder" courage. It springs from a sense of the strength which comes from union, the confidence which lies in comradeship, the support derived from a familiar "touch of the elbow."

A battery of artillery has often been ordered to open fire when there was no chance of doing the enemy any damage, merely for the moral effect upon the infantry, whose courage is always increased by feeling that they have the support of the noise of the sister arm of the service, if nothing else.

Indifference to danger is not always the form of courage which should entitle its possessor to the highest credit. It is a negative virtue as compared with the quality which enables one to perform a dangerous duty while realizing the full measure of the peril encountered.

These two traits are best illustrated by the old story of the two soldiers whose regiment was charging up a hill in a desperate attempt to capture a battery. When half-way up, one of them turned to the other and said, "Why, you 're as pale as a sheet; you look like a ghost; I believe you 're afraid." "Yes, I am," was the answer; "and if you were half as much afraid as I am you 'd have run long ago." It is something higher than physical courage, it is a species of moral courage, which recognizes the danger and yet overmasters the sense of fear. When the famous mine in front of Petersburg had been completed, and the National troops drawn up ready to charge the enemy's works as soon as the mine had done its work in creating a breach, the signal was given just before daylight, the fuse was lighted, and the command stood waiting with intense anxiety for the explosion which was to follow. But seconds, then minutes, then tens of minutes passed, and still no sound from the mine. The suspense became painful, and the gloom of disappointment overspread the anxious faces of officers and men. The fuse had been spliced about midway. It was now

thought that there was a defect in the splice, and that it was at this point that the fuse was hanging fire. The day was breaking, the enemy was becoming alert at sight of our unmasked columns, there was not a moment to be lost. Lieutenant Doughty and Sergeant Rees, of the 48th Pennsylvania infantry, now volunteered to examine the fuse. They entered the long dark gallery which led to the mine, and without stopping to calculate the chances of life, calmly exposed themselves to one of the most horrible forms of death. With no excitement to lend them its intoxication, with nothing to divert their minds from the fate which seemed to await them, they followed the course of the fuse through the long subterranean passage, found the defect at which the spark had been arrested, and made a new splice. On their return the match was again applied, and the train was now prompt to do its deadly work. These men displayed even a higher order of courage than those who afterwards charged into the breach.

Perhaps the most striking case of desperate and deliberate courage which the history of modern warfare has furnished was witnessed at Cold Harbor. The men had been repeatedly repulsed in assaulting earth-works, had each time lost heavily, and had become impressed with the conviction that such attacks meant certain death. One evening, after a dangerous assault had been ordered for daylight the next morning, I noticed in passing along the line that many of the men had taken off their coats and seemed engaged in mending rents in the back. Upon closer examination I found that they were calmly writing their names and home addresses on slips of paper, and pinning these slips upon the backs of their coats, so that their dead bodies might be recognized upon the field and their fate made known to their friends at home. Never was there a more gallant assault than that made by those men the next day, though their act of the night before bore painful proof that they had entered upon their work without a hope of surviving. Such courage is more than heroic; it is sublime.

Recklessness often masquerades as courage, but it is made of different mettle. Plato, in reasoning upon this subject, says: “As knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom, so a mind prepared to meet danger, if exerted by its own eagerness and not the public good, deserves the name of audacity rather than of courage."

Courage born of passion or excitement should always be looked upon with suspicion. It may fail at the very moment it is most needed. I remember a soldier in one of the regular batteries in the Army of the Cumber