to endless paths of new
temptation. What have I to do with Egypt? Yet I have been beguiled by
Flinders Petrie and by Maspero. How can I pretend to meddle with the
ancient geography of Asia Minor? Yet here have I bought Prof. Ramsay's
astonishing book, and have even read with a sort of troubled enjoyment a
good many pages of it; troubled, because I have but to reflect a moment,
and I see that all this kind of thing is mere futile effort of the
intellect when the time for serious intellectual effort is over.

It all means, of course, that, owing to defective opportunity, owing,
still more perhaps, to lack of method and persistence, a possibility that
was in me has been wasted, lost. My life has been merely tentative, a
broken series of false starts and hopeless new beginnings. If I allowed
myself to indulge that mood, I could revolt against the ordinance which
allows me no second chance. _O mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter
annos_! If I could but start again, with only the experience there
gained! I mean, make a new beginning of my intellectual life; nothing
else, O heaven! nothing else. Even amid poverty, I could do so much
better; keeping before my eyes some definite, some not unattainable,
good; sternly dismissing the impracticable, the wasteful.

And, in doing so, become perhaps an owl-eyed pedant, to whom would be for
ever dead the possibility of such enjoyment as I know in these final
years. Who can say? Perhaps the sole condition of my progress to this
state of mind and heart which make my happiness was that very stumbling
and erring which I so regret.

XVII.

Why do I give so much of my time to the reading of history? Is it in any
sense profitable to me? What new light can I hope for on the nature of
man? What new guidance for the direction of my own life through the few
years that may remain to me? But it is with no such purpose that I read
these voluminous books; they gratify--or seem to gratify--a mere
curiosity; and scarcely have I closed a volume, when the greater part of
what I have read in it is forgotten.

Heaven forbid that I should remember all! Many a time I have said to
myself that I would close the dreadful record of human life, lay it for
ever aside, and try to forget it. Somebody declares that history is a
manifestation of the triumph of good over evil. The good prevails now
and then, no doubt, but how local and transitory is such triumph. If
historic tomes had a voi