Nature & Animals Quote by Stephen Leacock

Leacock smuggles a flask into a sentence about bravery and lets the air out of the whole Victorian balloon of “physical courage.” The first line sets you up for a stiff-upper-lip sermon: riding a horse is dangerous, therefore the rider is noble. Then he snaps the frame with “This, however, I have,” a phrase that sounds like moral self-certification. The punchline arrives as an itemized purchase: courage, apparently, is not a virtue but a commodity, available cheaply, in bulk, and best taken in measured doses.

The specific intent is to lampoon masculine heroics and the etiquette of self-praise. He’s not denying that riding can be risky; he’s mocking the social performance around risk, the way certain classes turn leisure into an arena for honor. Horses were still status objects in Leacock’s era, tied to empire, officer culture, and respectable sport. By treating courage like bootleg medicine, he makes the aristocratic ideal of “natural bravery” look like a politely concealed habit.

The subtext is sharper: if courage can be bought at forty cents a flask, then the boundary between character and consumption collapses. That’s the economist’s joke wearing a clown nose. He’s pricing the soul, reducing an exalted abstraction to a market rate, and implicating the reader in the bargain. The humor works because it’s precise, not broad: “as required” is the final twist, suggesting courage isn’t a stable identity but an on-demand workaround, the kind of solution modern life keeps selling us.