That is a rude translation.  Poor Barates was brought to Britain, married a Norfolk woman of the British race, and spent his life on the wild frontier.  So the powerful queen passed away as a prisoner, her subjects were scattered over the earth, and her city, which was once renowned, is now haunted by lizard and antelope.  Alas for fame!  Alas for the stability of earthly things!  The conquerors of Zenobia fared but little better.  How strong must those emperors have been whose very name kept the world in awe!  If a man were proscribed by Rome, he was as good as dead; no fastness could hide him, no place in the known world could give him refuge, and his fate was regarded as so inevitable that no one was foolhardy enough to try at staving off the evil day.  How coolly and contemptuously the lordly proconsuls and magistrates regarded the early Christians.  Pliny did not so much as deign to notice their existence, and Pontius Pilate, who had to deal with the first twelve, seems to have looked upon them as mere pestilent malefactors who created a disturbance.  For many years those scornful Roman lords mocked the new sectarians and refused to take them seriously.  One scoffing magistrate asked the Christians who came before him why they gave him the trouble to punish them.  Were there no ropes and precipices handy, he asked, for those who wished to commit suicide?  Those Romans had great names in their day—­names as great as the names of Ellenborough and Wellesley and Gordon and Dalhousie and Bartle Frere, yet one would be puzzled to write down a list of six of the omnipotent sub-emperors.  They fought, they made laws, they ruled empires, they fancied themselves only a little less than the gods, and now not a man outside the circle of a dozen scholars knows or cares anything about them.  The wise lawgivers, the dread administrators, the unconquerable soldiers have gone with the snows, and their very names seem to have been writ in water.

If we come nearer our own time, we find it partly droll, partly pathetic to see how the bubble reputations have been pricked one by one.  “Who now reads Bolingbroke?” asked Burke.  Yes—­who?  The brilliant many-sided man who once held the fortunes of the empire in his hand, the specious philosopher, the unequalled orator is forgotten.  How large he loomed while his career lasted!  He was one of the men who ruled great England, and now he is away in the dark, and his books rot in the recesses of dusty libraries.  Where is the great Mr. Hayley?  He was arbiter of taste in literature; he thought himself a very much greater man than Blake, and an admiring public bowed down to him.  Probably few living men have ever read a poem of Hayley’s, and certainly we cannot advise anybody to try unless his nerve is good.  Go a little farther back, and consider the fate of the distinguished literary persons who were famous during the period which affected writers call the Augustan era of our literature.  The great poet who wrote—­