eded to found the Mogul Empire.

[11] The battle of Al-Kasr al Kebir, in Morocco, about fifty miles
south of Tangiers, was fought on August 4th, 1578. The king, Dom
Sebastian, and the flower of the Portuguese nobility died on the field.
As in Scotland after Flodden, there was not a house of name in Portugal
which had not its dead to mourn.

[12] The genius of this great thinker, patriot, scholar, and historian,
along with the heroism of the war of Candia, "the longest and most
memorable siege on record," as Voltaire designates it, throw a dying
lustre over the Venice of the seventeenth century, which in painting
has then but such names as those of Podovanino and the younger
Cagliari. Sarpi's defence of Venice against Paul V, an attorney in the
seat of Hildebrand, occurred in 1605. It consists of two works--the
_Tractate_ and the _Considerations_--and probably of a third drawn up
for the secret use of the Council of Ten. Like Voltaire, Sarpi seems
to have lived with a pen in his hand. His manuscripts in the Venice
archives fill twenty-nine folio volumes. The first collected edition
of his works was published, not unfitly, in the year of the fall of the
Bastille.

LECTURE VII

THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN

[_Tuesday, July_ 10_th_, 1900]

Though life itself and all its modes are transient, but shadows cast
through the richly-tinted veil of Maya upon the everlasting deep of
things, yet such dreams as those of perpetual peace and of empires
exempt from degeneration and decay, like the illusion of perpetual
happiness, the prayer of Spinoza for some one "supreme, continuous,
unending bliss," have mocked man from the beginning of recorded history
to the present hour. They are ancient as the rocks and their musings
from eternity, inextinguishable as the _elan_ of the soul imprisoned in
time towards that which is beyond time.

And yet the effect of these, as of all false illusions, is but to
render the value of Reality--I had almost said of the real
Illusion--more poignant. Indeed, "false" and "unreal" at all times are
mere designations we apply to the hours of dim and uncertain vision[1]
when tested by the standard which the moments of perfect insight afford.

Nothing is more tedious, yet nothing is more instructive, than the
study of the formulated ideals, the imagings of what life might be or
life ought to be, of poets or of systematic philosophers. Nothing so
instantly reconc