dismounted to walk with me.

"This park is a very different scene now," said Vincent, "from what it
was in the times of 'The Merry Monarch;' yet it is still, a spot much
more to my taste, than its more gaudy and less classical brother of
Hyde. There is something pleasingly melancholy, in walking over places
haunted by history; for all of us live more in the past than the
present."

"And how exactly alike in all ages," said I, "men have been. On the very
spot we are on now, how many have been actuated by the same feelings
that now actuate us--how many have made perhaps exactly the same remark
just made by you. It is this universal identity, which forms our most
powerful link with those that have been--there is a satisfaction in
seeing how closely we resemble the Agamemnons of gone times, and we take
care to lose none of it, by thinking how closely we also resemble the
sordidi Thersites."

"True," replied Vincent, "if wise and great men did but know, how little
difference there is between them and the foolish or the mean, they would
not take such pains to be wise and great; to use the Chinese proverb,
'they sacrifice a picture to get possession of its ashes.' It is almost
a pity that the desire to progress should be so necessary to our being;
ambition is often a fine, but never a felicitous feeling. Cyprian, in a
beautiful passage on envy, calls it 'the moth of the soul:' but perhaps,
even that passion is less gnawing, less a 'tabes pectoris,' than
ambition. You are surprised at my heat--the fact is, I am enraged
at thinking how much we forfeit, when we look up only, and trample
unconsciously, in the blindness of our aspiration, on the affections
which strew our path. Now, you and I have been utterly estranged
from each other of late. Why?--for any dispute--any disagreement in
private--any discovery of meanness--treachery, unworthiness in the
other? No! merely because I dine with Lord Lincoln, and you with Lord
Dawton, voila tout. Well say the Jesuits, that they who live for the
public, must renounce all private ties; the very day we become citizens,
we are to cease to be men. Our privacy is like Leo Decimus; [Note: See
Jovius.] directly it dies, all peace, comfort, joy, and sociality are
to die with it; and an iron age, 'barbara vis et dira malorum omnium
incommoda' [Note: See Jovius.] to succeed."

"It is a pity, that we struck into different paths," said I; "no
pleasure would have been to me greater, than making o