dying abjects who have
hardly known themselves; how much less thee, dead so long ago!

"When thou lookest upon a wise man, a lawyer, a captain of war, think
upon another gone. When thou seest thine own face in the glass, call
up there before thee one of thine ancestors--one of those old Caesars.
Lo! everywhere, thy double before thee! Thereon, let the thought occur
to thee: And where are they? anywhere at all, for ever? And thou,
thyself--how long? Art thou blind to that thou art--thy matter, how
temporal; and thy function, the nature of thy business? Yet tarry, at
least, till thou hast assimilated even these things to thine own proper
essence, as a quick fire turneth into heat and light whatsoever be cast
upon it.

"As words once in use are antiquated to us, so is it with the names
that were once on all men's lips: Camillus, Volesus, Leonnatus: then,
in a little while, Scipio and Cato, and then Augustus, and then
Hadrian, and then Antoninus Pius. How many great physicians who lifted
wise brows at other men's sick-beds, have sickened and died! Those wise
Chaldeans, who foretold, as a great matter, another man's last hour,
have themselves been taken by surprise. Ay! and all those others, in
their pleasant places: those who doated on a Capreae like [210]
Tiberius, on their gardens, on the baths: Pythagoras and Socrates, who
reasoned so closely upon immortality: Alexander, who used the lives of
others as though his own should last for ever--he and his mule-driver
alike now!--one upon another. Well-nigh the whole court of Antoninus
is extinct. Panthea and Pergamus sit no longer beside the sepulchre of
their lord. The watchers over Hadrian's dust have slipped from his
sepulchre.--It were jesting to stay longer. Did they sit there still,
would the dead feel it? or feeling it, be glad? or glad, hold those
watchers for ever? The time must come when they too shall be aged men
and aged women, and decease, and fail from their places; and what shift
were there then for imperial service? This too is but the breath of
the tomb, and a skinful of dead men's blood.

"Think again of those inscriptions, which belong not to one soul only,
but to whole families: Eschatos tou idiou genous:+ He was the last of
his race. Nay! of the burial of whole cities: Helice, Pompeii: of
others, whose very burial place is unknown.

"Thou hast been a citizen in this wide city. Count not for how long,
nor repine; since that which sends the