to serve him, and eager to testify their love and
attachment by kisses and embraces.

The second commences about the age of two or three years, when the
darling _child_ is permitted to crawl on the ground, and, like an
unclean animal, delights in dirt and filth.

Then at the age of ten, the thoughtless _boy_, without reflecting on the
past or caring for the future, jumps and skips about like a young kid on
the enamelled green, contented to enjoy the present moment.

The fourth stage begins about the age of twenty, when the _young man_,
full of vanity and pride, begins to set off his person by dress; and,
like a young unbroken horse, prances and gallops about in search of a
wife.

Then comes the _matrimonial state_, when the poor _man_, like a patient
ass, is obliged, however reluctantly, to toil and labour for a living.

Behold him now in the _parental state_, when surrounded by helpless
children craving his support and looking to him for bread. He is as
bold, as vigilant, and as fawning, too, as the faithful dog; guarding
his little flock, and snatching at everything that comes in his way, in
order to provide for his offspring.

At last comes the final stage, when the decrepit _old man_, like the
unwieldy though most sagacious elephant, becomes grave, sedate, and
distrustful. He then also begins to hang down his head towards the
ground, as if surveying the place where all his vast schemes must
terminate, and where ambition and vanity are finally humbled to the
dust.

* * * * *

But the Talmudist, in his turn, was forestalled by Bhartrihari, an
ancient Hindu sage, one of whose three hundred apothegms has been thus
rendered into English by Sir Monier Williams:

Now for a little while a child; and now
An amorous youth; then for a season turned
Into a wealthy householder; then, stripped
Of all his riches, with decrepit limbs
And wrinkled frame, man creeps towards the end
Of life's erratic course; and, like an actor,
Passes behind Death's curtain out of view.

Here, however, the Indian philosopher describes human life as consisting
of only four scenes; but, like our own Shakspeare, he compares the world
to a stage and man to a player. An epigram preserved in the _Anthologia_
also likens the world to a theatre and human life to a drama:

This life a theatre we well may call,
Where every actor must perform with art;
Or laugh it through, and make a farce of a