But if any of them
were of the class by whom those very triumphs have been achieved; the
thinkers and the workers, who, instead of entering lazily into other
men's labors, as the mob does, labor themselves; who know by hard
experience the struggles, the self-restraints, the disappointments, the
slow and staggering steps, by which the discoverer reaches to his prize;
then the smile of those men would not have been one of pity, but rather
of filial love. For they would have seen in those outwardly paltry
armaments the potential germ of that mightier one which now loads the
Black Sea waves; they would have been aware, that to produce it, with
such materials and knowledge as then existed, demanded an intellect, an
energy, a spirit of progress and invention, equal, if not superior, to
those of which we now so loudly boast.
But if, again, he had been a student of men rather than of machinery,
he would have found few nobler companies on whom to exercise his
discernment, than he might have seen in the little terrace bowling-green
behind the Pelican Inn, on the afternoon of the nineteenth of July.
Chatting in groups, or lounging over the low wall which commanded a
view of the Sound and the shipping far below, were gathered almost
every notable man of the Plymouth fleet, the whole posse comitatus
of "England's forgotten worthies.
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