IV.
“It often happens that things that are most neglected in one age become the ruling fashions of the next, just as things once highly honoured may often fall into complete discredit.
“Take this instance. In an old and dusty folio, entitled ‘Académie de l’Espée[2],’ which I discovered yesterday banished to the darkest corner of the library, I found several pages entirely devoted to the art ‘of delivering a stroke with the point at the right eye.’ The point is specified because in those days cuts and thrusts were held in equal favour.
“What do you say to a thrust in the eye? And yet if you will consult my folio you will find a collection of plates illustrating all the passes by which this brilliant stroke may be brought off.
“You know what is thought now-a-days of a hit in the face, that is to say on the mask; we are taught,—again quite wrongly,—not to take the smallest notice of it. And this leads me to hope that some day we may yet see a revolution, by which the vulgar belly will claim its rights and in its turn drive out the lordly bosom. It will be rated too highly then, as it is too much degraded now. But when did revolutions ever know where to stop?
“For the assault the one thing needful is self-reliance. Trust to your own resources, and do not imagine that you have to repeat word for word the lesson that you have got by heart from your book, but rather look for inspiration to the resources of your native wit.