‘Quem Deus perdere vult, prius dementat.’
Who would have the punning epigram upon the Cardinal De Fleuri, true of him?
‘Floruit sine fructu,
Defloruit sine luctu.’
There is a merry jingling in the sound, but under it is conveyed a mournful meaning. Yet it shall be written of all, who, either trusting to their native genius, or destitute of honorable ambition, flutter away their existence in mimicry of the tiny circlets of the silly fly, instead of pluming their wings and nerving their energies, for a bold, a steady, and a deathless flight. Youth gives its stamp to life, and life to immortality—time is a type of eternity. I have somewhere seen the vastness of the latter illustrated by the image of a huge chronometer, of which the starry heavens were the dial-plate, its pendulum swinging in cycles of ten thousand years, and ringing to myriads of ages.”
In such and similar discourse, did they consume the lagging hours of night: now changing ‘from grave to gay, from lively to severe,’ and glancing over all the subjects and circumstances in which a student might feel a personal or an associated interest. They talked of silly affection, and of scheming selfishness, and condemned alike that vanity, which could exult in a new pair of gloves, or be elated by that ‘shadow of a thing,’ yclept a reputation; and having in view this one position, that what one is, and not what he seems, forms his character and moulds his destiny,
‘Still they were wise whatever way they went.’
And now, Reader, we have done. If from this rude, incongruous heap, which, in the throwing together, has afforded us both pleasure and profit, you have been able to extricate any thing of either, we are satisfied. If by our unworthy portraiture of cheerful mirth without the taint of vicious excitement, a single heart, sick of the hollowness of dissipation, shall be seduced from its enticements—if one mind, till now swallowed in the vortex of current opinion, and dead to the merits of any save fashionable authors, should be led to the study of chaster models, and the formation of a purer taste—if one soul, whose fountains have been sealed to the thousand springs of written or unwritten poetry, gushing up all around him, has been opened to their influences—or if any individuals of the various classes which we have ventured to describe, shall, by the image of their deformity, be frighted, ‘if not into greater goodness, at least into less badness’—it is enough.
Ego.