"For he's their parent and he is their grave."
The doom is universal; it cannot be avoided. There must be an end to all temporal things, and why not to books? The same endless night awaits a Plato and a penny-a-liner. Our Eternities of Fame, like all else appertaining to humanity, will some day pass away. Even Milton and Shakspeare, our great staple international poets, who have been brought out whenever the American ambassador to England dined in public, are travelling the same downward path. How many of us, man or woman, on the sunny side of thirty, have gone through the "Paradise Lost"? And Shakspeare, in spite of new editions and of new commentators, is not half as much read as fifty years since. Perhaps the time will come when English speaking people will not know to whom they owe so many of the proverbs, metaphors, and eloquent words which enrich their daily talk.
Will none escape this inexorable fate? Homer and Robinson Crusoe seem to us to have the most tenacity of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[F] The proverbial French expression for the thief who rebuked his reviling comrade at the crucifixion.
[G] Démocrite, in an attack upon a heavy diner-out, says,—
"Il creuse son tombeau sans cesse avec ses dents,"—
and thus anticipates Sir Astley Cooper by many years. It is lucky that these fellows, who took a mean advantage of seniority to get off our good things before us, have perished, or they might give us trouble. At least two Frenchmen could claim "the glorious Epicurean paradox" of one of the seven wise men of Boston, "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries,"—M. de Voltaire, and M. de Coulanges, a generation earlier. These "flashing moments" of the wise in Boston, as in other great places, are often, like heat-lightning, reflections of a previous flash.