have translated the Talmud, and some of the great works of the Arabians.  Pooh! all this is mere learning and translation, and such will never secure immortality.  Translation is at best an echo, and it must be a wonderful echo to be heard after the lapse of a thousand years.  No! all I have already done, and all I may yet do in the same way, I may reckon as nothing—­mere pastime; something else must be done.  I must either write some grand original work, or conquer an empire; the one just as easy as the other.  But am I competent to do either?  Yes, I think I am, under favourable circumstances.  Yes, I think I may promise myself a reputation of a thousand years, if I do but give myself the necessary trouble.  Well! but what’s a thousand years after all, or twice a thousand years?  Woe is me!  I may just as well sit still.

‘Would I had never been born!’ I said to myself; and a thought would occasionally intrude:  But was I ever born?  Is not all that I see a lie—­a deceitful phantom?  Is there a world, and earth, and sky?  Berkeley’s doctrine—­Spinoza’s doctrine!  Dear reader, I had at that time never read either Berkeley or Spinoza.  I have still never read them; who are they, men of yesterday?  ‘All is a lie—­all a deceitful phantom,’ are old cries; they come naturally from the mouths of those who, casting aside that choicest shield against madness, simplicity, would fain be wise as God, and can only know that they are naked.  This doubting in the ‘universal all’ is almost coeval with the human race:  wisdom, so called, was early sought after.  All is a lie—­a deceitful phantom—­was said when the world was yet young; its surface, save a scanty portion, yet untrodden by human foot, and when the great tortoise yet crawled about.  All is a lie, was the doctrine of Buddh; and Buddh lived thirty centuries before the wise king of Jerusalem, who sat in his arbours, beside his sunny fish-pools, saying many fine things, and, amongst others, ’There is nothing new under the sun!’

* * * * *

One day, whilst I bent my way to the heath of which I have spoken on a former occasion, at the foot of the hills which formed it I came to a place where a wagon was standing, but without horses, the shafts resting on the ground; there was a crowd about it, which extended half-way up the side of the neighbouring hill.  The wagon was occupied by some half a dozen men; some sitting, others standing—­they were dressed in sober-coloured habiliments of black or brown, cut in a plain and rather uncouth fashion, and partially white with dust; their hair was short, and seemed to have been smoothed down by the application of the hand; all were bareheaded—­sitting or standing, all were bareheaded.  One of them, a tall man, was speaking as I arrived; ere, however, I could distinguish what he was saying, he left off, and then there was a cry for a hymn ’to the glory of God’—­that was the word.  It was a strange-sounding hymn, as well it might