VALOUR.
Valour is a 'virtue in the spirit which keeps the flesh in subjection,
resolves without fear, and travails without fainting: she vows no
villainy nor breaks her fidelity: she is patient in captivity and
pitiful in conquest. Her gain is honour and desert her mean, fortune her
scorn and folly her hate; wisdom is her guide and conquest her grace,
clemency her praise and humility her glory: she is youth's ornament and
age's honour, nature's blessing and virtue's love. Her life is
resolution and her love victory, her triumph truth, and her fame virtue.
Her arms are from antiquity and her coat full of honour, where the title
of grace hath her heraldry from heaven. She makes a walk of war and a
sport of danger, an ease of labour and a jest of death: she makes famine
but abstinence, want but a patience, sickness but a purge, and death a
puff. She is the maintainer of war, the general of an army, the terror
of an enemy, and the glory of a camp. She is the nobleness of the mind
and the strength of the body, the life of hope and the death of fear.
With a handful of men she overthrows a multitude, and with a sudden
amazement she discomfits a camp. She is the revenge of wrong and the
defence of right, religion's champion and virtue's choice. In brief, let
this suffice in her commendation:--She strengthened David and conquered
Goliath, she overthrows her enemies and conquers herself.
RESOLUTION.
Resolution is the honour of valour, in the quarrel of virtue, for the
defence of right and redress of wrong.
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