I am afraid that Milton's great line about ambition,


"That last infirmity of noble minds,"


is responsible for a good deal of harm, because it induces high-
minded persons of inexact ideas to think ambition a noble
infirmity, or at least to believe that they need not try to get rid
of their personal ambitions until they have conquered all their
other evil dispositions. I suppose that what Milton meant was that
it was the hardest of all faults to get rid of; and the reason why
it is so difficult to eject it, is because it is so subtle and
ingenious a spirit, and masquerades under such splendid disguises,
arrayed in robes of light. A man who desires to fill a high
position in the world is so apt to disguise his craving to himself
by thinking, or trying to think, that he desires a great place
because of the beneficent influence he can exert, and all the good
that he will be able to do, which shall stream from him as light
from the sun. Of course to a high-minded man that is naturally one
of the honest pleasures of an important post; but he ought to be
quite sure that his motive is that the good should be done, and not
that he should have the credit of doing it. I have burnt my own
fingers not once nor twice at the fire of ambition, and the subject
has been often in my mind. But my experiences were so wholly unlike