Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/54

 unlighted windows that are battered in; whereas, in other ages, it was with nations and light, as it is with dogs and water; if you give them none for a long time, they at last get a horror at it);—and on the whole, for Catechists, any park looks kindlier, and smiles more sweetly, than a sulphurous park of artillery; and the Warlike Foot, which the age is placed on, is to them the true Devil’s cloven-foot of human nature.

But for my part I think not so: almost as if the party-spirit influence of my Christian name, Attila, had passed into me more strongly than was proper, I feel myself impelled still farther to prove my courageousness; which, dearest Friends! I shall here in a few lines again do. This proof I could manage by mere inferences and learned citations. For example, if Galen remarks that animals with large hind-quarters are timid, I have nothing to do but turn round, and show the enemy my back, and what is under it, in order to convince him that I am not deficient in valour, but in flesh. Again, if by well-known experiences it has been found that flesh-eating produces courage, I can evince, that in this particular I yield to no officer of the service; though it is the habit of these gentlemen not only to run up long scores of roast-meat with their landlords, but also to leave them unpaid, that so at every hour they may have an open document in the hands of the enemy himself (the landlord), testifying that they have eaten their own share (with some of other people’s too), and so put common butcher’s-meat on a War-footing, living not like others by bravery, but for bravery. As little have I ever, in my character of chaplain, shrunk from comparison with any officer in the regiment, who may be a true lion, and so snatch every sort of plunder, but yet, like this King of the Beasts, is afraid of fire; or who,—like King James of England, that scampered off at sight of drawn swords, yet so much the more gallantly, before all Europe, went out against the storming Luther with book and pen, —