y
plot of our life's story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the
biography of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.

*****

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy;
and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow
backward the careers of our HOMUNCULUS and be reminded of our antenatal
lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
elements that build us.

*****

What is mine, then, and what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of
mine (which you love, and for the sake of which you dotingly dream that
you love me), not a gesture that I can frame, not a tone of my voice,
not a look from my eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love,
but has belonged to others? Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with
my eyes; other men have heard the pleadings of the same voice that now
sounds in your ears. The hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move
me, they pluck me, they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and
I but re-inform features and attributes that have long been laid aside
from evil in the quiet of the grave. Is it me you love, friend? or the
race that made me? The girl who does not know and cannot answer for the
least portion of herself? or the stream of which she is a transitory
eddy, the tree of which she is the passing fruit? The race exists; it is
old, it is ever young, it carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon
it, like waves upon the sea, individual succeeds individual, mocked with
a semblance of self-control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul,
but the soul is in the race.

*****

The future is nothing; but the past is myself, my own history, the seed
of my present thoughts, the mould of my present disposition. It is not
in vain that I return to the nothings of my childhood; for every one
of them has left some stamp upon me or put some fetter on my boasted
free-will. In the past is my present fate; and in the past also is my
real life.

*****

For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation, still keeps
some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not
altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord
Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of
an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as
the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our
communications with th