“To put us on our title,” said he, “implies a great war. Let us try and find out who and what are they who presume to declare it!”
The reader has been already told that Joe Nelligan had achieved a great success in his first case. A disputed point of law had been raised, in itself insignificant, but involving in its train a vast variety of momentous interests. Repton, with an ingenuity all his own, had contrived to draw the discussion beyond its original limits, that he might entangle and embarrass the ambitious junior who had dared to confute him. Nelligan accepted the challenge at once, and after a stormy discussion of some hours came out the victor. For a while his timid manner, and an overpowering sense of the great odds against him, seemed to weigh oppressively on him. The very successes he had won elsewhere were really so many disparagements to him now, giving promise, as it were, of his ability. But, despite all these disadvantages, he entered the lists manfully and courageously.
What a many-sided virtue is this same courage, and how prone is the world to award its praises unequally for it! We are enthusiastic for the gallant soldier the earliest in the breach, or the glorious sailor who first jumps upon the enemy's quarter-deck, and yet we never dream of investing with heroism him who dares to combat with the most powerful intellects of debate, or enters the field of argument against minds stored with vast resources of knowledge, and practised in all the subtleties of disputation.
It is time, existence is not in the issue; but are there not things a thousand times dearer than life at peril? Think of him who has gone on from success to success; whose school triumphs have but heralded the riper glories of college life; who, rising with each new victory, is hailed by that dearest and best of all testimonies,--the prideful enthusiasm of his own age. Fancy him, the victor in every struggle, who has carried all before him,--the vaunted chief of his contemporaries,--fancy him beaten and worsted on his first real field of action. Imagine such a man, with all the prestige of his college fame, rudely encountered and overcome in the contest of public life, and say if any death ever equalled the suffering!