was not like to bewitch or entice me when I saw that it was adulterate. I met with several great persons, whom I liked very well, but could not perceive that any part of their greatness was to be liked or desired, no more than I would be glad or content to be in a storm, though I saw many ships which rid safely and bravely in it. storm would not agree with my stomach, if it did with my courage. Though I was in a crowd of as good company as could be found anywhere, though I was in business of great and honourable trust, though I ate at the best table, and enjoyed the best conveniences for present subsistence that ought to be desired by a man of my condition in banishment and public distresses, yet I could not abstain from renewing my old schoolboy's wish in a copy of verses to the same effect. Well then; I now do plainly see, This busy world and I shall ne'er agree, &c.1 And I never then proposed to myself any other advantage from His Majesty's happy restoration, but the getting into some moderately convenient retreat in the country, which I thought in that case I might easily have compassed, as well as some others, with no greater probabilities or pretences, have arrived to extraordinary fortunes. But I had before written a shrewd prophecy against myself, and I think Apollo inspired me in the truth, though not in the elegance of it. Thou, neither great at court nor in the war, Nor at th' exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar; Which neglected verse does raise, &c.2 However, by the failing of the forces which I had 1 The opening lines of "The Wish", one of the poems published in 1647 under the collective name of The Mistress. 2 From "Destiny", the seventh of Cowley's fifteen Pindarique Odes published in 1656. expected, I did not quit the design which I had resolved on; I cast myself into it A corps perdu, without making capitulations or taking counsel of fortune. But God laughs at a man who says to his soul, "Take thy ease": I met presently not only with many little encumbrances and impediments, but with so much sickness (a new misfortune to me) as would have spoiled the happiness of an emperor as well as mine. Yet I do neither repent nor alter my course. Non ego perfidum dixi sacramentum. Nothing shall separate me from a mistress which I have loved so long, and have now at last married, though she neither has brought me a rich portion, nor lived yet so quietly with me as I hoped from her. -Nec vos, dulcissima mundi Nomina, vos Musa, libertas, otia, libri, You of all names the sweetest, and the best, But this is a very petty ejaculation. Because I have concluded all the other chapters with a copy of verses, I will maintain the humour to the last. MARTIAL, LIB. 10, EP. 47. Vitam quæ faciunt beatiorem, etc. SINCE, dearest friend, 't is your desire to see Let constant fires the winter's fury tame, Let mirth and freedom make thy table good. Enjoy the present hour, be thankful for the past, MARTIAL, LIB. 10, EP. 96. ME, who have lived so long among the great, And a retreat so distant, as may show No thoughts of a return when once I go. The ground about the house maintains it there, 1an equal quantity. Here every frugal man must oft be cold, Stay you then here, and live among the great, DANIEL DEFOE. (1661-1731.) IV. THE INSTABILITY OF HUMAN GLORY.1 IR, I have employed myself of late pretty much in the SIR, study of history, and have been reading the stories of the great men of past ages, Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar, the great Augustus, and many more down, down, down, to the still greater Louis XIV., and even to the still greatest John, Duke of Marlborough'. In my way I met with Tamerlane3, the Scythian, Tomornbejus, the Egyptian, Solyman5, the Magnificent, and others of the Mahometan or Ottoman race; and after all the great 1 This essay appeared on July 21, 1722, in The Original Weekly Journal and Saturday's Post, started by Applebee on 2nd Oct. 1714. From 1720 to 1726 Defoe contributed weekly articles in the form of "letters introductory". These letters-admittedly the prototypes of "leading articles"—were first introduced by Defoe in the sixty-eighth number of Mist's Journal, 1718. 2 The Duke died five weeks before the date of Defoe's essay. 3 Timour (1336-1405) made war on the whole world in support of what he regarded as the true Mahometan faith. He defeated the Ottoman Sultan, and died when preparing to invade China. 4 Tumanbeg or Tumanbai, the last Mameluke Sultan, was defeated and put to death by Selîm in 1517. "Suleiman, the Magnificent, the Lawgiver (1490-1566), was the greatest constructor of the Ottoman power. The capture of Rhodes, the invasion of Hungary, and the siege of Vienna were his most famous exploits. things they have done I find it said of them all, one after another, AND THEN HE DIED, all dead, dead, dead! hic jacet is the finishing part of their history. Some lie in the bed of honour, and some in honour's truckle bed; some were bravely slain in battle on the field of honour, some in the storm of a counterscarp and died in the ditch of honour; some here, some there;-the bones of the bold and the brave, the cowardly and the base, the hero and the scoundrel, are heaped up together; there they lie in oblivion, and under the ruins of the earth, undistinguished from one another, nay, even from the common earth. "Huddled in dirt the blust'ring engine lies, That was so great, and thought himself so wise." How many hundreds of thousands of the bravest fellows then in the world lie on heaps in the ground, whose bones are to this day ploughed up by the rustics, or dug up by the labourer, and the earth their more noble vital parts are converted to has been perhaps applied to the meanest uses! How have we screened the ashes of heroes to make our mortar, and mingled the remains of a Roman general to make a hog sty! Where are the ashes of a Cæsar, and the remains of a Pompey, a Scipio, or a Hannibal? All are vanished, they and their very monuments are mouldered into earth, their dust is lost, and their place knows them no more. They live only in the immortal writings of their historians and poets, the renowned flatterers of the age they lived in, and who have made us think of the persons, not as they really were, but as they were pleased to represent them. As the greatest men, so even the longest lived. The Methusalems of the antediluvian world-the accounts of them all end with the same: Methusalem lived nine hundred sixty and nine years and begat sons and daughters -and what then? AND THEN HE DIED. |