A Book of Golden Deeds | Page 3

of Golden Deeds that we seek to lay before our readers;
but, ere entering upon them, perhaps we had better clearly understand
what it is that to our mind constitutes a Golden Deed.
It is not mere hardihood. There was plenty of hardihood in Pizarro
when he led his men through terrible hardships to attack the empire of
Peru, but he was actuated by mere greediness for gain, and all the perils
he so resolutely endured could not make his courage admirable. It was
nothing but insensibility to danger, when set against the wealth and

power that he coveted, and to which he sacrificed thousands of helpless
Peruvians. Daring for the sake of plunder has been found in every
robber, every pirate, and too often in all the lower grade of warriors,
from the savage plunderer of a besieged town up to the reckless
monarch making war to feed his own ambition.
There is a courage that breaks out in bravado, the exuberance of high
spirits, delighting in defying peril for its own sake, not indeed
producing deeds which deserve to be called golden, but which, from
their heedless grace, their desperation, and absence of all base
motives-- except perhaps vanity have an undeniable charm about them,
even when we doubt the right of exposing a life in mere gaiety of heart.
Such was the gallantry of the Spanish knight who, while Fernando and
Isabel lay before the Moorish city of Granada, galloped out of the camp,
in full view of besiegers and besieged, and fastened to the gate of the
city with his dagger a copy of the Ave Maria. It was a wildly brave
action, and yet not without service in showing the dauntless spirit of the
Christian army. But the same can hardly be said of the daring shown by
the Emperor Maximilian when he displayed himself to the citizens of
Ulm upon the topmost pinnacle of their cathedral spire; or of Alonso de
Ojeda, who figured in like manner upon the tower of the Spanish
cathedral. The same daring afterwards carried him in the track of
Columbus, and there he stained his name with the usual blots of
rapacity and cruelty. These deeds, if not tinsel, were little better than
gold leaf.
A Golden Deed must be something more than mere display of
fearlessness. Grave and resolute fulfillment of duty is required to give it
the true weight. Such duty kept the sentinel at his post at the gate of
Pompeii, even when the stifling dust of ashes came thicker and thicker
from the volcano, and the liquid mud streamed down, and the people
fled and struggled on, and still the sentry stood at his post, unflinching,
till death had stiffened his limbs; and his bones, in their helmet and
breastplate, with the hand still raised to keep the suffocating dust from
mouth and nose, have remained even till our own times to show how a
Roman soldier did his duty. In like manner the last of the old Spanish
infantry originally formed by the Great Captain, Gonzalo de Cordova,
were all cut off, standing fast to a man, at the battle of Rocroy, in 1643,
not one man breaking his rank. The whole regiment was found lying in

regular order upon the field of battle, with their colonel, the old Count
de Fuentes, at their head, expiring in a chair, in which he had been
carried, because he was too infirm to walk, to this his twentieth battle.
The conqueror, the high-spirited young Duke d'Enghien, afterwards
Prince of Condé, exclaimed, 'Were I not a victor, I should have wished
thus to die!' and preserved the chair among the relics of the bravest of
his own fellow countrymen.
Such obedience at all costs and all risks is, however, the very essence
of a soldier's life. An army could not exist without it, a ship could not
sail without it, and millions upon millions of those whose 'bones are
dust and good swords are rust' have shown such resolution. It is the
solid material, but it has hardly the exceptional brightness, of a Golden
Deed.
And yet perhaps it is one of the most remarkable characteristics of a
Golden Deed that the doer of it is certain to feel it merely a duty; 'I
have done that which it was my duty to do' is the natural answer of
those capable of such actions. They have been constrained to them by
duty, or by pity; have never even deemed it possible to act otherwise,
and did not once think of themselves in the matter at all.
For the true metal of a Golden Deed is self-devotion. Selfishness is the
dross and alloy that gives the unsound ring to many an act that has been
called glorious. And, on the