e a humble faith in
the Ruler of all. If he recovers, some half-dozen people will be made
happy; if he does not recover, the same number of people will be made
miserable for a little while, and, during the next two or three days,
acquaintances will meet in the street--"You've heard of poor So-and-so?
Very sudden! Who would have thought it? Expect to meet you at ----'s
on Thursday. Good-bye." And so to the end. Your death and my death
are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be
stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts
close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although
we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are
near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss
us much either.

We are curious as to death-beds and death-bed sayings; we wish to know
how the matter stands; how the whole thing looks to the dying.
Unhappily--perhaps, on the whole, happily--we can gather no information
from these. The dying are nearly as reticent as the dead. The
inferences we draw from the circumstances of death, the pallor, the
sob, the glazing eye, are just as likely to mislead us as not. Manfred
exclaims, "Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die!" Sterling wrote
Carlyle "that it was all very strange, yet not so strange as it seemed
to the lookers on." And so, perhaps, on the whole it is. The world
has lasted six thousand years now, and, with the exception of those at
present alive, the millions who have breathed upon it--splendid
emperors, horny-fisted clowns, little children, in whom thought has
never stirred--_have_ died, and what they have done, we also shall be
able to do. It may not be so difficult, may not be so terrible, as our
fears whisper. The dead keep their secrets, and in a little while we
shall be as wise as they--and as taciturn.

[1] Montaigne.

[2] Bacon.

WILLIAM DUNBAR

If it be assumed that the North Briton is, to an appreciable extent, a
different creature from the Englishman, the assumption is not likely to
provoke dispute. No one will deny us the prominence of our cheek-bones,
and our pride in the same. How far the difference extends, whether it
involves merit or demerit, are questions not now sought to be settled.
Nor is it important to discover how the difference arose; how far chiller
climate and sourer soil, centuries of unequal yet not inglorious
conflict, a separate