Ginger-pop beer is it that you scoff?  Verily, you do an unconsidered deed.  When one remembers all the liquids, medicinal, soporific, insipid, poisonous, which flood the throat of humanity, one may deem himself a favorite of Fortune to be placed so high in the catalogue.  Though upon his lowliness gleam down the rosy and purple lights of rare old wines aloft, yet from his altitude he can look below upon a profane crowd in thick array of depth immeasurable, and rejoice that he is not stagnant water nor exasperated vinegar nor disappointed buttermilk.  Nay, I am not only content, but exultant.  It may be an ignoble satisfaction, yet I believe I would rather flash and fade in one moment of happy daylight than be corked and cob-webbed for fifty years in the dungeons of an unsunned cellar, with a remote possibility, indeed, of coming up from my incarceration to moisten the lips of beauty or loosen the tongue of eloquence, but with a far surer prospect of but adding one more to the potations of the glutton and wine-bibber.

And what, after all, is this oblivion which you flaunt so threateningly?  Even if I do encounter it, no misfortune will happen unto me but such as is common unto men.  Of all the souls of this generation, the number that will sift through the meshes of the years is infinitesimately small.  The overwhelming majority of names will turn out to be chaff, and be blown away.  I shall be forgotten, but I shall be forgotten in very good company.  The greater part of my kin-folk and acquaintance, your own self, my critic, and your family and friends, will go down in the same darkness which ingulfs me.  When I am dead, I shall be no deader than the rest of you, and I shall have been a great deal more alive while I was alive.

I am not afraid to be forgotten.  Posterity will have its own soothsayers, and somewhere among the stars, I trust, I shall be living a life so intense and complete that I shall never once think to lament that I am not mulling on a bookshelf down here.  Besides, if you insist upon it, I am not going to be forgotten.  You don’t know anything more about it than I do.  Knowledge is not always prescience.  “This will never do,” ruled Jeffrey from his judgment-seat.  “Order reigns in Warsaw,” pronounced Sebastiani.  “I have now gone through the Bible,” chuckled Tom Paine, “as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees.  Here they lie, and the priests, if they can, may replant them.  They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow.”  But Wordsworth to-day is reverenced by the nation that could barb no arrow sharp enough to shoot at him.  The evening sky that bends above Warsaw is red with the watch-fires of her old warfare bursting anew from their smouldering ashes.  And the oaks that doughty Paine fancied himself to have levelled show not so much as a scratch upon their sturdy trunks.  Nay, I do not forget that even Charles Lamb was fiercely belabored by his own generation.