CHANGE INEVITABLE. 347 



case of Diocletian, who abdicated his throne for the 

 planting of cabbages; and the last example of a great 

 man so doing is that of the ex-Premier in vacating 

 his premiership for the felling of timber. The 

 familiar games invented for our amusement, croquet 

 and the skating-rink, have given place to badminton 

 and lawn-tennis. Man, the most intelligent of all 

 created beings, is the most capricious ; proposing to 

 himself the accomplishment of one thing, and ending 

 by doing another. In nothing, perhaps, is this vari- 

 ableness so marked as in racing. To illustrate this, 

 we need not go very far back in search of knowledge 

 from the records of antiquity. Every day proves it 

 too plainly, with regrettable certainty. The Olympian 

 games will show us that the charioteers drove their 

 steeds with reckless impetuosity, at the continual 

 risk of their lives, in the vain hope of obtaining a 

 perishable and worthless memento of their courage 

 and dexterity in driving. But those impractical 

 clays are past, and with them the pleasure they 

 excited in undergoing great feats and hardships for 

 the sake of barren honour, in ' giving from fool to 

 fool the laurel crown.' FalstafF did not believe in 

 honour, and I may ask, Who does ? ' Honour, who 

 hath it ? He that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel 

 it ? No. Doth he hear it ? No. Is it insensible then ? 

 Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living ? 

 No. AVhy ? Detraction will not suffer it : — therefore 

 I'll none of it.' Au'ain, Butler, in his inimitable 



