n, sacrificing pleasure to toil, had placed its goal
at a distance, remote from the huzzas of bystanders; and Ambition halted
now, baffled and despairing. Childless, his line would perish with
himself--himself, who had so vaunted its restoration in the land! His
genius was childless also--it would leave behind it no offspring of the
brain. By toil he had amassed ample wealth; by talent he had achieved a
splendid reputation. But the reputation was as perishable as the wealth.
Let a half-century pass over his tomb, and nothing would be left to
speak of the successful lawyer the applauded orator, save traditional
anecdotes, a laudatory notice in contemporaneous memoirs--perhaps, at
most, quotations of eloquent sentences lavished on forgotten cases
and obsolete debates--shreds and fragments of a great intellect, which
another half-century would sink without a bubble into the depths of
Time. He had enacted no laws--he had administered no state--he had
composed no books. Like the figure on a clock, which adorns the case
and has no connection with the movement, he, so prominent an ornament
to time, had no part in its works. Removed, the eye would miss him for
a while; but a nation's literature or history was the same, whether
with him or without. Some with a tithe of his abilities have the luck to
fasten their names to things that endure; they have been responsible for
measures they did not not invent, and which, for good or evil, influence
long generations. They have written volumes out of which a couplet of
verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell
that survives a deluge. But the orator, whose effects are immediate--who
enthralls his audience in proportion as he nicks the hour--who, were he
speaking like Burke what, apart from the subject-matter, closet students
would praise, must, like Burke, thin his audience, and exchange present
oratorical success for ultimate intellectual renown--a man, in short,
whose oratory is emphatically that of the DEBATER is, like an actor,
rewarded with a loud applause and a complete oblivion. Waife on the
village stage might win applause no less loud, followed by oblivion not
more complete.

Darrell was not blind to the brevity of his fame. In his previous
seclusion he had been resigned to that conviction--now it saddened him.
Then, unconfessed by himself, the idea that he might yet reappear in
active life, and do something which the world would not willingly let
die,