The circumstances in which men are involuntarily placed marvellously affect their actions. Crowd together a number of young trees in one small plot, and how slowly they grow, how stunted they become! Remove them to separate stations, where their roots may spread, their branches expand, and their leaves drink freely of the sun and air, and how soon they take their place among the giants of the forest. So it is with men. Crowded in cities, undistinguished by birth, and unassisted by patronage, many a hero dies unseen and unnoticed—
“Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast, The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.”
Let it not, therefore, be imagined, from the foregoing instances, that every Greco-Roman Nose indicates an energetic statesman, or a literary monarch; or that the same actions are to be predicated from the same form of Nose in different men under different circumstances.
Energy and refinement may exist in every department of life. The peasant may furnish as illustrious an example of either as the Prince. But what a King has, these heroes want; and so they die unhonoured for lack of a record. The illustrations are, therefore, necessarily drawn from the high and mighty of various spheres.
Stars of lesser magnitude, however, present themselves to shed a further light upon the subject.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH and SIR PHILIP SIDNEY were two men whose characters exhibited many points of identity.
In any arduous enterprize which promised fame and honour, Sir Walter Raleigh was always prominent. Eager to support the Reformation, he served in the Protestant army as a volunteer during the civil wars in France, and afterwards tendered his services to the Netherlands in their contest with Spain for civil and religious liberty. One of the most attractive enterprizes of the reign of Elizabeth to men of energy and forethought was, however, that presented by the recently-opened field of American discovery. Into this Raleigh threw himself heart and soul. With his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, he made the then perilous voyage to the New World, but failed to establish a firm footing on its shores.