Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/208

194 theories, but could not be provoked into hot 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 seamonster Horatio, a more insatiable fire-eater than any of the desperadoes 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 him 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 Nelson experienced no fits of combativeness needing 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, père, was a miser and bigot of conservatism, sticking to his Provençal 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 frequent a phenomenon that Goethe seemed to consider it the normal result of a niggardly education:

 Ist der Vater auf Geld versessen, Und nützt sogar die Lampen-Schnuppen. Kriegen sie dann der Sohn in die Kluppen, Gauner und Dirnen werden es fressen."