In connexion with the struggles of public life timidity and weakness can find plenty of excuses, but as a last and most desperate plea they urge ‘advancing years’. This is their pretext _par excellence_ for blunting ambition and putting it out of countenance. They argue that there is a fitting close to a public, as much as to an athletic, career. For these reasons [Sidenote: C] I think it well to take my own ordinary reflections upon ‘old men in public life’ and lay them before yourself. They may prevent either of us from deserting that long companionship which has hitherto followed a common path, and from abandoning that public life which may be regarded as a familiar friend from youth up, in order to adopt another which is unfamiliar, and with which there is no time for us to become thoroughly intimate. I would have us abide by our original principle, and determine that life and the worthy life shall end together. It is not for us to convert the brief remainder into a confession that the bulk of our time has been wastefully applied to no good purpose. [Sidenote: D] It is not, indeed, true—as some one told Dionysius—that ‘despotism is a fine shroud’. In his case the combination of absolutism with injustice was only made all the more complete a calamity by the fact that it never ceased. It was therefore a shrewd remark of Diogenes, when at a later date he saw Dionysius’ son in a humble private station at Corinth. ‘Dionysius,’ said he, ‘you are far from receiving your deserts. Instead of living a free and fearless life here with us, you ought to have been there, housed in the despot’s palace and made to live in it, like your father, till old age.’ It is different with constitutional and democratic statesmanship. When a man has learned to show himself a profitable subject as well as a profitable ruler, he [Sidenote: E] does indeed obtain at death a ‘fine shroud’, in the shape of the good name earned by his life. For this—to quote Simonides— _Is the last thing to sink beneath the ground_, except in cases where high human interests and noble zeal are earlier to fail and die than natural desires.