s to live in the meanwhile. When the
event is so remote or so independent of the will as to set aside the
necessity of immediate action, or to baffle all attempts to defeat it,
it gives us little more disturbance or emotion than if it had already
taken place, or were something to happen in another state of being, or
to an indifferent person. Criminals are observed to grow more anxious as
their trial approaches; but after their sentence is passed, they become
tolerably resigned, and generally sleep sound the night before its
execution.

It in some measure confirms this theory, that men attach more or less
importance to past and future events according as they are more or less
engaged in action and the busy scenes of life. Those who have a fortune
to make, or are in pursuit of rank and power, think little of the
past, for it does not contribute greatly to their views: those who have
nothing to do but to think, take nearly the same interest in the past as
in the future. The contemplation of the one is as delightful and real as
that of the other. The season of hope has an end; but the remembrance of
it is left. The past still lives in the memory of those who have
leisure to look back upon the way that they have trod, and can from
it 'catch-glimpses that may make them less forlorn.' The turbulence of
action, and uneasiness of desire, must point to the future: it is only
in the quiet innocence of shepherds, in the simplicity of pastoral ages,
that a tomb was found with this inscription--'I ALSO WAS AN ARCADIAN!'

Though I by no means think that our habitual attachment to life is in
exact proportion to the value of the gift, yet I am not one of those
splenetic persons who affect to think it of no value at all. _Que peu de
chose est la vie humaine_, is an exclamation in the mouths of moralists
and philosophers, to which I cannot agree. It is little, it is short,
it is not worth having, if we take the last hour, and leave out all that
has gone before, which has been one way of looking at the subject. Such
calculators seem to say that life is nothing when it is over, and that
may in their sense be true. If the old rule--_Respice finem_--were to be
made absolute, and no one could be pronounced fortunate till the day
of his death, there are few among us whose existence would, upon those
conditions, be much to be envied. But this is not a fair view of the
case. A man's life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of
the ca