the
point--that posthumous fame is not worth the living agonies that obtain
it, how are you better off in your poor and vulgar career of action?
Would you assist the rulers?--servility! The people?--folly! If you take
the great philosophical view which the worshippers of the past rarely
take, but which, unknown to them, is their sole excuse,--namely, that
the changes which _may_ benefit the future unsettle the present; and
that it is not the wisdom of practical legislation to risk the peace
of our contemporaries in the hope of obtaining happiness for their
posterity,--to what suspicions, to what charges are you exposed! You are
deemed the foe of all liberal opinion, and you read your curses in the
eyes of a nation. But take the side of the people. What caprice, what
ingratitude! You have professed so much in theory, that you can never
accomplish sufficient in practice. Moderation becomes a crime; to be
prudent is to be perfidious. New demagogues, without temperance, because
without principle, outstrip you in the moment of your greatest services.
The public is the grave of a great man's deeds; it is never sated; its
maw is eternally open; it perpetually craves for more. Where, in the
history of the world, do you find the gratitude of a people? You find
fervour, it is true, but not gratitude,--the fervour that exaggerates a
benefit at one moment, but not the gratitude that remembers it the next
year. Once disappoint them, and all your actions, all your sacrifices,
are swept from their remembrance forever; they break the windows of the
very house they have given you, and melt down their medals into bullets.
Who serves man, ruler or peasant, serves the ungrateful; and all the
ambitious are but types of a Wolsey or a De Witt."

"And what," said Trevylyan, "consoles a man in the ills that flesh is
heir to, in that state of obscure repose, that serene inactivity to
which you would confine him? Is it not his conscience? Is it not his
self-acquittal, or his self-approval?"

"Doubtless," replied Vane.

"Be it so," answered the high-souled Trevylyan; "the same consolation
awaits us in action as in repose. We sedulously pursue what we deem to
be true glory. We are maligned; but our soul acquits us. Could it do
more in the scandal and the prejudice that assail us in private life?
You are silent; but note how much deeper should be the comfort, how much
loftier the self-esteem; for if calumny attack us in a wilful obscurity,
what