a shadow.  Look at that squirrel who twirls and twirls in his cage.  He wears his heart out in his ceaseless efforts at progression, and all the while his mocking prison whirls under him without letting him progress one inch.  How much happier he would be if he stayed in his hutch and enjoyed his nuts!  You are like the restless squirrel; you make a great show of movement and some noise, but you do not get forward at all.  Rest quietly when your necessary labour is done, and be sure that more than half the things men struggle for and fail to attain would not be worth the having even if the strugglers succeeded.  Do not waste one moment; do not neglect one duty, for a duty lost is the deadliest loss of all; snatch every rational pleasure that comes within your reach; earn all the love you can, for that is the most precious of all possessions, and leave the search for fame to those who are petty and vain.”

Such a cold and chilling speech would be a very good medicine for uneasy vanity, but the best medicine of all is the contemplation of the history of men who have flourished and loomed large before their fellows, and who now have sunk into the night.  How many mighty warriors have made the earth tremble, filling the mouths of men with words of fear or praise!  They have passed away, and the only record of their lives is a chance carving on a stone, a brief line written by some curt historian.  The glass of the years was brittle wherein they gazed for a span; the glass is broken and all is gone.  In the wastes of Asia we find mighty ruins that even now are like symbols of power—­vast walls that impose on the imagination by their bulk, enormous statues, temples that seem to mock at time and destruction.  The men who built those structures must have had supreme confidence in themselves, they must have possessed incalculable resources, they must have been masters of their world.  Where are they now?  What were their names?  They have sunk like a spent flame, and we have not even the mark on a stone to tell us how they lived or loved or struggled.  Far in that moaning desert lie the remains of a city so great that even the men who know the greatest of modern cities can hardly conceive the original appearance and dimensions of the tremendous pile.  Travellers from Europe and America go there and stand speechless before works that dwarf all the efforts of modern men.  The woman who ruled in that strong city was an imposing figure in her time, but she died in a petty Roman villa as an exile, and Palmyra, after her departure, soon perished from off the face of the earth.  One pathetic little record enables us to guess what became of the population over whom the queen Zenobia ruled.  A stone was dug up on the northern border of England, and the inscription puzzled all the antiquarians until an Oriental scholar found that the words were Syriac.  “Barates of Palmyra erects this stone to the memory of his wife, the Catavallaunian woman who died aged thirty-three.”