“Lo here is man’s state—in flowers significate:
The flower fades and perishes,—so man but ashes is;
Who mayst be thou feelest,—whence com’st thou revealest;
Laugh shouldst thou never,—but be weeping for ever;
Three things there are truly,—which make me say duly,
The first hard thing ’tis to know,—that to death I must go;
The second I fear then,—since I know not the when;—
The third again will I weep,—for I know not in life to keep.”
The celebrated speech of Jaques to his dethroned master, “All the world’s a stage,” from As You Like It (act ii. sc. 7, lines 139–165, vol. ii. p. 409), is closely constructed on the model of the Emblematical Devices in the foregoing Block-print. The simple quoting of the passage will be sufficient to show the parallelism and correspondence of the thoughts, if not of the expressions,—
“Jaques.All the world’s a stage,