is is best, and, on the whole, I should propose to let
things find pretty much their own level.

However this may be, who can question that the treasures hidden in
many a country house contain sleeping beauties even fairer than
those that I have endeavoured to waken from long sleep in the
foregoing article? How many Mrs. Quicklys are there not living in
London at this present moment? For that Mrs. Quickly was an
invention of Shakespeare's I will not believe. The old woman from
whom he drew said every word that he put into Mrs. Quickly's mouth,
and a great deal more which he did not and perhaps could not make
use of. This question, however, would again lead me far from my
subject, which I should mar were I to dwell upon it longer, and
therefore leave with the hope that it may give my readers absolutely
no food whatever for reflection.

How to Make the Best of Life {142}

I have been asked to speak on the question how to make the best of
life, but may as well confess at once that I know nothing about it.
I cannot think that I have made the best of my own life, nor is it
likely that I shall make much better of what may or may not remain
to me. I do not even know how to make the best of the twenty
minutes that your committee has placed at my disposal, and as for
life as a whole, who ever yet made the best of such a colossal
opportunity by conscious effort and deliberation? In little things
no doubt deliberate and conscious effort will help us, but we are
speaking of large issues, and such kingdoms of heaven as the making
the best of these come not by observation.

The question, therefore, on which I have undertaken to address you
is, as you must all know, fatuous, if it be faced seriously. Life
is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument
as one goes on. One cannot make the best of such impossibilities,
and the question is doubly fatuous until we are told which of our
two lives--the conscious or the unconscious--is held by the asker to
be the truer life. Which does the question contemplate--the life we
know, or the life which others may know, but which we know not?

Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their
so-called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of
Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the Odyssey, and of
Jane Austen--the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion
within their own bodies, or that in virtue of whi