turning round all
the time of the performance, as if they moved of themselves.

The hearing a speech in Parliament drawled or stammered out by the
honorable member or the noble lord, the ringing the changes on their
commonplaces, which anyone could repeat after them as well as they, stirs
me not a jot,--shakes not my good opinion of myself. I ask what there is
that I can do as well as this. Nothing. What have I been doing all my
life? Have I been idle, or have I nothing to show for all my labor and
pains? Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty
sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an
argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and
not finding them? Is there no one thing in which I can challenge
competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which
others can not find a flaw?

The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow
can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned
to spell. What abortions are these essays! What errors, what ill-pieced
transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is
made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do.

I endeavor to recollect all I have ever heard or thought upon a subject,
and to express it as neatly as I can. Instead of writing on four subjects
at a time, it is as much as I can manage, to keep the thread of one
discourse clear and unentangled. I have also time on my hands to correct
my opinions and polish my periods; but the one I can not, and the other I
will not, do. I am fond of arguing; yet, with a good deal of pains and
practice, it is often much as I can do to beat my man, though he may be a
very indifferent hand. A common fencer would disarm his adversary in the
twinkling of an eye, unless he were a professor like himself. A stroke of
wit will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or
superiority in sense or reasoning. There is no complete mastery of
execution to be shown there; and you hardly know the professor from the
impudent pretender or the mere clown.

LXXVII. ANTONY OVER CAESAR'S DEAD BODY. (281)

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears:
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble