and what
is thus true of animal corruption, may with small variation be affirmed
of human mortality. I turn off my footman, and hire another; and he puts
on the livery of his predecessor: he thinks himself somebody; but he
is only a tenant. The same thing is true, when a country-gentleman, a
noble, a bishop, or a king dies. He puts off his garments, and another
puts them on. Every one knows the story of the Tartarian dervise,
who mistook the royal palace for a caravansera, and who proved to his
majesty by genealogical deduction, that he was only a lodger. In this
sense the mutability, which so eminently characterises every thing
sublunary, is immutability under another name.

The most calamitous, and the most stupendous scenes are nothing but an
eternal and wearisome repetition: executions, murders, plagues, famine
and battle. Military execution, the demolition of cities, the conquest
of nations, have been acted a hundred times before. The mighty
conqueror, who "smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke," who
"sat in the seat of God, shewing himself that he was God," and assuredly
persuaded himself that he was doing something to be had in everlasting
remembrance, only did that which a hundred other vulgar conquerors had
done in successive ages of the world, whose very names have long since
perished from the records of mankind.

Thus it is that the human species is for ever engaged in laborious
idleness. We put our shoulder to the wheel, and raise the vehicle out of
the mire in which it was swallowed, and we say, I have done something;
but the same feat under the same circumstances has been performed
a thousand times before. We make what strikes us as a profound
observation; and, when fairly analysed, it turns out to be about as
sagacious, as if we told what's o'clock, or whether it is rain or
sunshine. Nothing can be more delightfully ludicrous, than the important
and emphatical air with which the herd of mankind enunciate the most
trifling observations. With much labour we are delivered of what is to
us a new thought; and, after a time, we find the same in a musty volume,
thrown by in a corner, and covered with cobwebs and dust.

This is pleasantly ridiculed in the well known exclamation, "Deuce take
the old fellows who gave utterance to our wit, before we ever thought of
it!"

The greater part of the life of the mightiest genius that ever existed
is spent in doing nothing, and saying nothing. Pope has obse