 No more self-complacency, no more rapture, no more
self-approving and heart-transporting benevolence! He, who had lived beyond any
man upon the grand and animating reveries of the imagination, seemed now to have
no visions but of anguish and despair. His case was peculiarly worthy of
sympathy, since no doubt, if rectitude and purity of disposition could give a
title to happiness, few men could exhibit a more consistent and powerful claim
than Mr. Falkland.
    He was too deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of chivalry
ever to forget the situation, humiliating and dishonourable according to his
ideas, in which he had been placed upon this occasion. There is a mysterious
sort of divinity annexed to the person of a true knight, that makes any species
of brute violence committed upon it indelible and immortal. To be knocked down,
cuffed, kicked, dragged along the floor! sacred heaven, the memory of such a
treatment was not to be endured! No future lustration could ever remove the
stain: and, what was perhaps still worse in the present case, the offender
having ceased to exist, the lustration which the laws of knight-errantry
prescribe was rendered impossible.
    In some future period of human improvement it is probable that that calamity
will be in a manner unintelligible, which in the present instance contributed to
tarnish and wither the excellence of one of the most elevated and amiable of
human minds. If Mr. Falkland had reflected with perfect accuracy upon the case,
he would probably have been able to look down with indifference upon a wound
which, as it was, pierced to his very vitals. How much more dignity than in the
modern duellist do we find in Themistocles, the most gallant of the Greeks; who,
when Eurybiades, his commander in chief, in answer to some of his remonstrances,
lifted his cane over him with a menacing air, accosted him in that noble
apostrophe, Strike, but hear?
    How would a man of true discernment in such a case reply to his brutal
assailant? I make it my boast that I can endure calamity and pain: shall I not
be able to endure the trifling inconvenience that your folly can inflict upon
me? Perhaps a human being would be more accomplished, if he understood the
science of personal defence; but how few would be the occasions upon which he
would be called to exert it? How few human beings would he encounter so unjust
and injurious as you, if his own conduct were directed by the principles of
reason and benevolence? Beside, how narrow would be the use of this science,
when acquired?
