peare speak to us probably far more effectually than they did
to the men of their own time, and most likely we have them at their best.
I cannot think that Shakespeare talked better than we hear him now in
"Hamlet" or "Henry the Fourth"; like enough he would have been found a
very disappointing person in a drawing-room. People stamp themselves on
their work; if they have not done so they are naught; if they have we
have them; and for the most part they stamp themselves deeper in their
work than on their talk. No doubt Shakespeare and Handel will be one day
clean forgotten, as though they had never been born. The world will in
the end die; mortality therefore itself is not immortal, and when death
dies the life of these men will die with it--but not sooner. It is
enough that they should live within us and move us for many ages as they
have and will. Such immortality, therefore, as some men and women are
born to, achieve, or have thrust upon them, is a practical if not a
technical immortality, and he who would have more let him have nothing.

I see I have drifted into speaking rather of how to make the best of
death than of life, but who can speak of life without his thoughts
turning instantly to that which is beyond it? He or she who has made the
best of the life after death has made the best of the life before it; who
cares one straw for any such chances and changes as will commonly befall
him here if he is upheld by the full and certain hope of everlasting life
in the affections of those that shall come after? If the life after
death is happy in the hearts of others, it matters little how unhappy was
the life before it.

And now I leave my subject, not without misgiving that I shall have
disappointed you. But for the great attention which is being paid to the
work from which I have quoted above, I should not have thought it well to
insist on points with which you are, I doubt not, as fully impressed as I
am: but that book weakens the sanctions of natural religion, and
minimises the comfort which it affords us, while it does more to
undermine than to support the foundations of what is commonly called
belief. Therefore I was glad to embrace this opportunity of protesting.
Otherwise I should not have been so serious on a matter that transcends
all seriousness. Lord Beaconsfield cut it shorter with more effect. When
asked to give a rule of life for the son of a friend he said, "Do not let
him try and find out wh