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One hundred and eighteen years ago a little man who had attracted the attention of two continents, and who, in his comparatively brief career of forty-five years, had won eternal fame for himself among the heroes of the world, died in Paris, alone in his room.
Twelve rings were arranged in a line, and he whose arrow was sent through the whole twelve was to have the queen for his prize. A bow that one of his brother heroes had given to Ulysses in former times was brought from the armory, and with its quiver full of arrows was laid in the hall.
The French and British dead were laid in the same graves "Are they not brothers?" asked the man with the spade and as soon as the peasants had courage to creep back to their villages and their woods they gathered leaves and strewed them upon those mounds of earth among which I wandered, as heroes' wreaths.
He was a man among men, the flesh of human flesh. He had not a thought that was not in action, and all his actions were grand yet common. It is this vulgar grandeur which makes heroes. And Napoleon is the perfect hero. His brain never surpassed his hand that hand, small and beautiful, which grasped the world. He never had, for a moment, the least care for what he could not reach."
He was the first of all the heroes of the Church who dared to contend with the temporal powers, not as a man uttering a protest, but as an equal adversary, as a warrior bent on victory. Therefore has his name great historical importance. I know of no man who equalled him in intrepidity, and in a far-reaching policy.
He admired his figure, his strong arms, his voice, his laugh, his gaiety, and he shone with pride when he heard praise of his father's talents as a virtuoso, or when Melchior himself recited with some amplification the eulogies he had received. He believed in his father's boasts, and looked upon him as a genius, as one of his grandfather's heroes.
The Anglo-Saxon energy which swept from this continent the dominion of those who sought only wealth, and which substituted the thrift of the voyagers of the Mayflower and of the settlers of Jamestown which Speaks of the battles with the Indians, which tells of the glories not only of victories but of the defeats of the heroes of the Revolution all are incentives for purer and better citizenship.
In fact, on account of the peculiar interest which this long and narrow valley of verdure, with its wonderful structures, the strange and anomalous course of nature which prevails in it, and the extraordinary phases which human life, in consequence, exhibits there, has always excited among mankind, heroes and conquerors have generally considered it a peculiarly glorious field for their exploits.
O'Grady may have failed in his appeal to the aristocracy of his own time but he may yet create an aristocracy of character and intellect in Ireland. The political and economic writings will remain to uplift and inspire and to remind us that the man who wrote the stories of heroes had a bravery of his own and a wisdom of his own.
"With your ten thousand francs a year, and the legacy from your Aunt Carabas, added to the twenty thousand francs that your husband earns, you must keep a carriage; and since you go to all the theatres without paying, since journalists are the heroes of all the inaugurations so ruinous for those who keep up with the movement of Paris, and since they are constantly invited to dinner, you live as if you had an income of sixty thousand francs a year!
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