But is there not something of rest, of calm, in the thought of gently and gradually fading away out of human remembrance?  What line have we written that was on a level with our conceptions?  What page of ours that does not betray some weakness we would fain have left unrecorded?  To become a classic and share the life of a language is to be ever open to criticisms, to comparisons, to the caprices of successive generations, to be called into court and stand a trial before a new jury, once or more than once in every century.  To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation.  The line which dying we could wish to blot has been blotted out for us by a hand so tender, so patient, so used to its kindly task, that the page looks as fair as if it had never borne the record of our infirmity or our transgression.  And then so few would be wholly content with their legacy of fame.  You remember poor Monsieur Jacques’s complaint of the favoritism shown to Monsieur Berthier,—­it is in that exquisite “Week in a French Country-House.”  “Have you seen his room?  Have you seen how large it is?  Twice as large as mine!  He has two jugs, a large one and a little one.  I have only one small one.  And a tea-service and a gilt Cupid on the top of his looking-glass.”  The famous survivor of himself has had his features preserved in a medallion, and the slice of his countenance seems clouded with the thought that it does not belong to a bust; the bust ought to look happy in its niche, but the statue opposite makes it feel as if it had been cheated out of half its personality, and the statue looks uneasy because another stands on a loftier pedestal.  But “Ignotus” and “Miserrimus” are of the great majority in that vast assembly, that House of Commons whose members are all peers, where to be forgotten is the standing rule.  The dignity of a silent memory is not to be undervalued.  Fame is after all a kind of rude handling, and a name that is often on vulgar lips seems to borrow something not to be desired, as the paper money that passes from hand to hand gains somewhat which is a loss thereby.  O sweet, tranquil refuge of oblivion, so far as earth is concerned, for us poor blundering, stammering, misbehaving creatures who cannot turn over a leaf of our life’s diary without feeling thankful that its failure can no longer stare us in the face!  Not unwelcome shall be the baptism of dust which hides forever the name that was given in the baptism of water!  We shall have good company whose names are left unspoken by posterity.  “Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?  The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been; to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man.  Twenty-seven names make up the first story before the flood, and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century.”