efactors who created a disturbance. For
many years those scornful Roman lords mocked the new sectarians and
refused to take them seriously. One scoffing magistrate asked the
Christians who came before him why they gave him the trouble to punish
them. Were there no ropes and precipices handy, he asked, for those
who wished to commit suicide? Those Romans had great names in their
day--names as great as the names of Ellenborough and Wellesley and
Gordon and Dalhousie and Bartle Frere, yet one would be puzzled to
write down a list of six of the omnipotent sub-emperors. They fought,
they made laws, they ruled empires, they fancied themselves only a
little less than the gods, and now not a man outside the circle of a
dozen scholars knows or cares anything about them. The wise lawgivers,
the dread administrators, the unconquerable soldiers have gone with
the snows, and their very names seem to have been writ in water.

If we come nearer our own time, we find it partly droll, partly
pathetic to see how the bubble reputations have been pricked one by
one. "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" asked Burke. Yes--who? The brilliant
many-sided man who once held the fortunes of the empire in his hand,
the specious philosopher, the unequalled orator is forgotten. How
large he loomed while his career lasted! He was one of the men who
ruled great England, and now he is away in the dark, and his books rot
in the recesses of dusty libraries. Where is the great Mr. Hayley? He
was arbiter of taste in literature; he thought himself a very much
greater man than Blake, and an admiring public bowed down to him.
Probably few living men have ever read a poem of Hayley's, and
certainly we cannot advise anybody to try unless his nerve is good. Go
a little farther back, and consider the fate of the distinguished
literary persons who were famous during the period which affected
writers call the Augustan era of our literature. The great poet who
wrote--

"Behold three thousand gentlemen at least,
Each safely mounted on his capering beast"--

what has become of that bard's inspired productions? They have gone
the way of Donne and Cowley and Waller and Denham, and nobody cares
very much. Take even the great Cham of literature, the good Johnson.
His fame is undying, but his works would not have saved his reputation
in vigour during so many generations. To all intents and purposes his
books are dead; the laboured writings which he turned out during his
yea