severe to him than they might have been to a man of quicker and more
brilliant capacities, when a feverish cold, caught at a county meeting
in which his first public appearance was so creditable as fully to
justify the warmest hopes of his party, produced inflammation of the
lungs and ended fatally. The startling contrast forced on my mind,--
here, sudden death and cold clay; there, youth in its first flower,
princely rank, boundless wealth, the sanguine expectation of an
illustrious career, and the prospect of that happiness which smiled from
the eyes of Fanny,--that contrast impressed me with a strange awe: death
seems so near to us when it strikes those whom life most flatters and
caresses. Whence is that curious sympathy that we all have with the
possessors of worldly greatness when the hour-glass is shaken and the
scythe descends? If the famous meeting between Diogenes and Alexander
had taken place, not before, but after the achievements which gave to
Alexander the name of Great, the Cynic would not, perhaps, have envied
the hero his pleasures nor his splendors,--neither the charms of Statira
nor the tiara of the Mede; but if, the day after, a cry had gone forth,
"Alexander the Great is dead!" verily I believe that Diogenes would have
coiled himself up in his tub and felt that with the shadow of the
stately hero something of glory and of warmth had gone from that sun
which it should darken never more. In the nature of man, the humblest
or the hardest, there is a something that lives in all of the Beautiful
or the Fortunate, which hope and desire have appropriated, even in the
vanities of a childish dream.




CHAPTER VI.