CHAPTER XXIV.
DUELLING.
Fahtaff. Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour pricks me off when I come on ? How then ? Can honour set to a leg ? No. Or an arm ? No. Or take away the grief of a wound ? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word, honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning ! Who hath it? He that died o'Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it; therefore I'll none of it; honour ia a mere 'scutcheon and so ends my catechism.
The time is past when to an average intellect the necessity exists of denouncing duelling, and we have now only to regard with astonishment the bondage of our aiicestors to this folly. In the evolution of progress, fashion, that is to say actively expressed opinion or belief, is constantly undergoing change ; indeed, change of belief, and corresponding action, is progress. And as some of the beliefs of past ages are to us absurdities so gross that we can only wonder how some minds could for a moment have entertained them, so will certain of our creeds and conduct appear to generations following:.
Take for example woman; along the highways of history how variable her condition 1 Alternately slave and saint, now she is the drudge and chattel of man and now his companion and idol. To us the strangest of all strange passions that ever blotted the human heart, seems that from which sprung the cruel treatment of women which formed a prominent feature in ancient and half-civilized warfare. What to us could possibly seem more unnatural than the picture of an enraged soldier in whom blind fury had so
