194 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



theories, but could not be provoked into liot controversies, and missed 

 several chances to assert his claims to preferment rather than run 

 the risks incidental to an antagonism of interests. 



And that most non-aggressive of mortals originated the sea- 

 monster Horatio,' a more insatiable fire-eater than any of the despera- 

 does that followed the fortunes of Frundsberg and Skanderbeg. 

 During the siege of Calvi he marched a detachment within a stone's 

 throw of a sea wall, to be on hand for a rush into the first breach, 

 and stood motionless, watching the effects of the cannonade, till a 

 shower of splinters struck him full in the face and knocked out one 

 of his eyes. At Trafalgar he would not even button his overcoat 

 enough to cover the insignia of his rank when the sharpshooters of 

 the Bucentaur began their close-range target practice. " What's the 

 matter, Wheeler — have you got the belly-ache? " he chuckled, when 

 the captain of the deck battery conjured liim to notice that five or six 

 musket balls had knocked the splinters out of the mast close over his 

 head. And when the overshot marksmen at last mended their aim, 

 his first exclamation was one of military approval : " That's a good 

 one! By Gotham, they've got me this time! " 



" Energies bottled up {represses) in one generation are apt to 

 explode in the next," says Chamfort, probably with the allusion to 

 such cases as that of Hamilcar, who had sworn vengeance to Rome 

 and passed his life hungering and thirsting for the opportunity 

 which at last came to his son; or the elder Carlyle, an illiterate 

 orator and amateur controversialist, hampered by the lack of the 

 high-grade tools which education supplied to the author of the Latter- 

 day Pamphlets. 



But preacher !N'elson experienced no fits of combativeness need- 

 ing repression in stress of circumstances; he was pacific by instinct, 

 and more averse to controversies than could always be reconciled with 

 the exigencies of his situation. 



Jean Jacques Rousseau was the son of a well-to-do artisan, more 

 distinguished by his convivial disposition than by a lurking penchant 

 for solitude or social revolt. Mirabeau, pere, was a miser and bigot 

 of conservatism, sticking to his Provencal country seat like a badger 

 to his den, while his son exhausted his resources in extravaganzas and 

 needed lettres de cachet to restrain his roving mania. 



That revulsion from avarice to extravagance is, indeed, so fre- 

 quent a phenomenon that Goethe seemed to consider it the normal 

 result of a niggardly education: 



" 1st der Vater auf Cxeld versesseii, 

 Und niltzt sogar die Lampen-Schuuppeii, 

 Kriegen sie dann der Sohn in die Kluppeu, 

 Gauner und Dirnen werden es fressen."' 



