_J’ai vécu_—I managed to keep alive—was the Abbé Siéyès’ answer to those who, in after days, asked him how he spent his time in the Reign of Terror. And it is in allusion to his position at that season of peril, when no one could reckon on a morrow—_nul ne pouvait se promettre un lendemain_—that he quotes the _vers charmants_ made in 1708 by Maucroix, then fourscore and upwards:— “Chaque jour est un bien que du Ciel je reçoi! Jouissons aujourd’hui de celui qu’il nous donne: Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’à moi, Et celui de demain n’appartient à personne.” “What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?” said Ducos, as the Girondins were whiling away their last evening here on earth. And each of them replied as the humour took him, or the subject impressed him. The favourite answer seems to have been, We shall sleep after the fatigues of the day. To some the feeling may have been, too literally and very bitterly, what Wordsworth versified as he gazed from Rydal Mount on a slowly-sinking star: “We struggle with our fate, While health, power, glory, from their height decline, Depressed; and then extinguished; and our state, In this, how different, lost Star, from thine, That no to-morrow shall our beams restore!” To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. For some time had the Emperor Francis—Maria Theresa’s consort—been threatened with an apoplexy, when, on the morning of the 18th of August, 1764, being pressed by his sister to be blooded, he answered, “I am engaged this evening to sup with Joseph, and will not disappoint him; but I promise you I will be blooded to-morrow.” At the opera in the evening he was taken ill. Retiring, he was struck with apoplexy, and died at Joseph’s feet, for he had fallen from Joseph’s arms. At his feet—like one of old time—he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at his feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead. Boast not thyself of to-morrow. Hardly less hackneyed in the ear of scholar and schoolboy, yet hardly less impressive as truisms with ever-living truth in them, are Horace’s Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernæ crastina summæ Tempora Di superi? (who knows whether the powers above will add a morrow to the day that now is?), and Seneca’s Never was man so in favour with the gods as to be able to promise himself a morrow: Nemo tam divos habuit faventes, Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri.