imney and thy Chinese
sign-post,--these yet ask the concluding hand. Thy hand is cold; their
completion, and the enjoyment the completion yields, are for another!
Thou sowest, and thy follower reaps; thou buildest, thy successor holds;
thou plantest, and thine heir sits beneath the shadow of thy trees,--

"Neque harum, quas colis, arborum
Te, praeter invisas cupressos,
Ulla brevem dominum sequetur!"

["Nor will any of these trees thou didst cultivate follow thee,
the shortlived lord, save the hateful Cyprus."]

At this moment thy life,--for thou veert a Great Man to thine order,
and they have added thy biography to that of Abershaw and Sheppard,--thy
life is before us. What a homily in its events! Gayly didst thou laugh
into thy youth, and run through the courses of thy manhood. Wit sat
at thy table, and Genius was thy comrade. Beauty was thy handmaid; and
Frivolity played around thee,--a buffoon that thou didst ridicule, and
ridiculing enjoy! Who among us can look back to thy brilliant era, and
not sigh to think that the wonderful men who surrounded thee, and amidst
whom thou wert a centre and a nucleus, are for him but the things of
history, and the phantoms of a bodiless tradition? Those brilliant.
suppers, glittering with beauty, the memory of which makes one spot
(yet inherited by Bachelor Bill) a haunted and a fairy ground; all who
gathered to that Armida's circle,--the Grammonts and the Beauvilliers
and the Rochefoucaulds of England and the Road,--who does not feel that
to have seen these, though but as Gil Blas saw the festivities of his
actors, from the sideboard and behind the chair, would have been a
triumph for the earthlier feelings of his old age to recall? What,
then, must it have been to have seen them as thou didst see,--thou, the
deceased and the forgotten!---seen them from the height of thy youth and
power and rank (for early wert thou keeper to a public), and reckless
spirits, and lusty capacities of joy? What pleasures where sense
lavished its uncounted varieties? What revellings where wine was the
least excitement?

Let the scene shift. How stirring is the change! Triumph and glitter
and conquest! For thy public was a public of renown; thither came the
Warriors of the Ring,--the Heroes of the Cross,--and thou, their patron,
wert elevated on their fame! "Principes pro victoria pugnant, comites
pro Principe."--[Chiefs for the v